The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective / Edited by Jacqueline Knörr and Chris- Toph Kohl

Home , Almami, Artiletra, Baga language, Bandial language, Bayot language, Cape Verdean Americans

Th e Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective Integration and Confl ict Studies Published in Association with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale Series Editor: Günther Schlee, Director of the Department of Integration and Confl ict at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Editorial Board: Brian Donahoe (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), John Eidson (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Peter Finke (University of Zurich), Joachim Görlich (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Jacqueline Knörr (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Bettina Mann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Stephen Reyna (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) Assisted by: Cornelia Schnepel and Viktoria Zeng (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) Th e objective of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology is to advance anthropological fi eldwork and enhance theory building. ‘Integration’ and ‘confl ict’, the central themes of this series, are major concerns of the contemporary social sciences and of signifi cant interest to the general public. Th ey have also been among the main research areas of the institute since its foundation. Bringing together international experts, Integration and Confl ict Studies includes both monographs and edited volumes, and off ers a forum for studies that contribute to a better understanding of processes of identifi cation and inter-group relations.

Volume 1 Volume 7 How Enemies are Made: Towards a Th eory of Variations on Uzbek Identity: Strategic Choices, Ethnic and Religious Confl icts Cognitive Schemas and Political Constraints in Günther Schlee Identifi cation Processes Peter Finke Volume 2 Changing Identifi cations and Alliances in Volume 8 North-East Africa Domesticating Youth: Th e Youth Bulge and its Vol.I: Ethiopia and Kenya Socio-Political Implications in Tajikstan Edited by Günther Schlee and Elizabeth E. Watson Sophie Roche Volume 3 Volume 9 Changing Identifi cations and Alliances in Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia North-East Africa Jacqueline Knörr Vol.II: Sudan, Uganda and the Ethiopia- Volume 10 Sudan Borderlands Friendship, Descent and Alliance in Africa: Edited by Günther Schlee and Elizabeth E. Watson Anthropological Perspectives Volume 4 Edited by Martine Guichard, Tilo Grätz and Playing Diff erent Games: Th e Paradox of Anywaa Youssouf Diallo and Nuer Identifi cation Strategies in the Gambella Volume 11 Region, Ethiopia Masks and Staff s: Identity Politics in the Cameroon Dereje Feyissa Grassfi elds Volume 5 Michaela Pelican Who Owns the Stock? Collective and Multiple Volume 12 Forms of Property in Animals Th e Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective Edited by Anatoly M. Khazanov and Günther Edited by Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl Schlee Volume 6 Irish/ness is All Around Us: Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland Olaf Zenker Th e Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective

Edited by Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Knörr, Jacqueline, 1960– editor. | Kohl, Christoph, editor. Title: The Upper Guinea coast in global perspective / edited by Jacqueline Knörr and Chris- toph Kohl. Other titles: Integration and conflict studies ; v. 12. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2016. | Series: Integration and conflict studies ; volume 12 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015026968| ISBN 9781785330698 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785330704 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Globalization—Political aspects—Guinea (Region) | Guinea (Region)—Politics and government. | Guinea (Region)—Social conditions. Classification: LCC DT477 .U67 2016 | DDC 966.5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015026968

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ISBN 978-1-78533-069-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-070-4 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-78533-373-6 (open access ebook) In Memoriam

Th is book is dedicated to the memory of Christian Kordt Højbjerg (1961–2014). Christian was an associate professor at the University of Aarhus (Denmark) and a long-time member of the research group ‘Integration and Confl ict along the Upper Guinea Coast’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. After studying at the University of Aarhus, Christian did graduate work at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales before obtaining his Ph.D. and his Habilitation in anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. His areas of specialization included Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Mau- ritius. He published extensively on a range of subjects, including historical memory, ritual and social organization, confl ict and emergent political orders, identity and diff erence, and the role of refl exivity in shaping both social change and theoretical change. Th roughout his work, Christian demonstrated mastery of many skills: he was a dedicated ethnographer, a critical and in-depth analyst, an inspirational teacher, a compassionate man and a fi ne scholar with an open and active mind. As a member of our research group, Christian made a great and valuable contribution to our work. We have lost a wonderful friend and colleague whom we will miss and keep in our hearts and minds as an inspiration for our lives and research. On behalf of all contributors to this book and the members, associates and friends of the Research Group ‘Integration and Confl ict along the Upper Guinea Coast’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,

Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

Contents

List of Maps and Figures ix Introduction: Th e Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective 1 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

Part I. Creole Connections Chapter 1. Towards a Deﬁ nition of Transnational as a Family Construct: A Historical and Micro Perspective 21 Bruce L. Mouser Chapter 2. Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared: Th e Cases of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka 40 Christoph Kohl Chapter 3. Freetown’s Yoruba-Modelled Secret Societies as Transnational and Transethnic Mechanisms for Social Integration 58 Nathaniel King

Part II. Diasporic Entanglements Chapter 4. Contested Transnational Spaces: Debating Emigrants’ Citizenship and Role in Guinean Politics 77 Anita Schroven Chapter 5. Identity beyond ID: Diaspora within the Nation 95 Markus Rudolf Chapter 6. Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands: Interaction, Integration and the Forging of an Immigration Policy 116 Pedro F. Marcelino Chapter 7. Celebrating Asymmetries: Creole Stratiﬁ cation and the Regrounding of Home in Cape Verdean Migrant Return Visits 135 Heike Drotbohm

Part III. Travelling Models Chapter 8. Travelling Terms: Analysis of Semantic Fluctuations in the Atlantic World 157 Wilson Trajano Filho viii Contents

Chapter 9. Rice and Revolution: Agrarian Life and Global Food Policy on the Upper Guinea Coast 174 Joanna Davidson Chapter 10. Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement: Youth and Women in the Moral Economy of Patronage in Postwar Liberia and Sierra Leone 197 William P. Murphy Chapter 11. Expanding the Space for Freedom of Expression in Postwar Sierra Leone 222 Sylvanus Spencer Chapter 12. Sierra Leone, Child Soldiers and Global Flows of Child Protection Expertise 241 Susan Shepler

Part IV. Interregional Integration Chapter 13. The ‘Mandingo Question’: Transnational Ethnic Identity and Violent Conflict in an Upper Guinea Border Area* 255 Christian K. Højbjerg (†) Chapter 14. Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer: Transnational Connections and Home Politics in the Twentieth-Century Gambia 280 Alice Bellagamba Chapter 15. Market Networks and Warfare: A Comparison of the Seventeenth-Century Blade Weapons Trade and the Nineteenth-Century Firearms Trade in the Casamance 299 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta Index 315

*This chapter is not available in the open access edition due to rights restrictions. It is accessible in the print and retail e-book editions, spanning pages 180–204. List of Maps and Figures

Maps 1.1 Rio Pongo 23 13.1 Border of Liberia and Guinea 260

Figures 6.1 (1) Internal migration routes and internal migration incentives; (2) irregular migration ship/zodiac routes from West Africa. 122 6.2 Tentative inclusion/exclusion model: (1) perceived professional activity, ethnicity and class; (2) level of integration in host society. 125 7.1 A bandeira, the feast’s ﬂ ag, is run up the feast’s pole. 143 7.2 Coladreiras, drummers and the festeiro, donating small- denomination U.S. bills. 145 8.1 Synoptic Chart of Semantic Shifts 169

Introduction Th e Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

For centuries, the Upper Guinea Coast region of West Africa has been characterized by connections and interactions with societies and thought worlds in various parts of Africa and beyond. Th is book explores these regional and global encounters and exchanges, and points to the disruptions and continuities they caused as well as to the region’s infl uences on other parts of the world. Its chapters focus on the region’s entanglements with diff erent societies, entanglements triggered by the expansion of colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and, more recently, densifying transnational networks and increased global interaction – processes and institutions that are interconnected and interdependent in manifold ways. Authors investigate various aspects of the Upper Guinea Coast’s connections with societies in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe as well as the region’s exposure to external orders and value systems, including resulting creative adaptations and transformations. While historical perspectives are employed, this volume focuses primarily on current developments and present-day eff ects of historical interactions. Th e notion ‘Upper Guinea Coast’, as it is understood here, follows Walter Rodney’s (1970) infl uential monograph A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800. It refers to a littoral West African region that stretches from present- day Senegal in the north to the western part of Côte d’Ivoire, including the Cape Verdean archipelago. Th us, it entirely or partially covers the territories of Gam- bia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cape Verde. As elaborated in Knörr and Trajano Filho (2010: 2), we conceptualize the Upper Guinea Coast as a ‘primarily geographic label that helps us to place and correlate historical, cultural, linguistic, and social phenomena and processes in regional terms’. Besides their physical contiguity, the parts of the region are characterized by many similarities, from social and cultural forms and institutions to historical experiences, political structures and specifi cities concerning modes of social and societal interaction and processes of integration and confl ict (Knörr and Trajano Filho 2010: 2–10). 2 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

Th e headings of the following sections reﬂ ect our focus on four major dimensions of the Upper Guinea Coast’s global connectedness: ‘Creole Connections’, ‘Diasporic Entanglements’, ‘Travelling Models’ and ‘Interregional Integration’. Combining anthropological and historical perspectives, we look at the social interactions, societal and political conditions, and historical contexts of the Upper Guinea Coast’s global connectedness, thereby trying to capture contemporary globalization in this particular region of the world in its synchronic and diachronic relations and complexities.

Creole Connections Trans-Saharan trade networks (see Austen 2010) have linked littoral commercial hubs with Africa’s interior for centuries. Th ey contributed to the spread of Islam and expansion of Mandingo and, later on, Fula domination over parts of the region, entailing both religious and ethnic conversions and migrations (Person 1968– 1975; Robinson 1985; Gaillard 2000). Coastal trading posts founded by the Por- tuguese and Cape Verdeans have linked Europe with the Upper Guinea Coast and Africa’s interior since the late fi fteenth century. By also opening new (‘third’) spaces for European-African encounters, these entrepôts fostered the emergence of Luso-Creole culture and identities (including Luso-Creole language varieties and localized forms of Christianity) (Mark 2002; Brooks 2003; Havik 2004). ‘Eurafricans’ (Brooks 2003) often functioned as intermediaries in economic, social and cultural interaction and exchange. In many cases they were also involved in the slave trade that connected West Africa with the Americas and Europe (see e.g. Green 2012; cf. Lahon 1999; Rodrigues 1999). Th e Upper Guinea Coast (Cape Verde, the Gambia, Sierra Leone and Liberia) was not only a slave hub but also a fi nal destination for slaves and freed slaves. Mark and da Silva Horta (2011) have recently shown the outcomes these historic networks had in the Upper Guinea Coast region, outcomes that included resilience as well as the constant reshaping of identities and alliances. However, Upper Guinea’s relationships were not exclusive to the ‘Atlantic World’ (Falola and Roberts 2008). Rather, the Upper Guinea Coast also served as a transit station for European colonizers and their concepts en route to Asia. Christoph Kohl picks up this fi nding in this volume. Taking the examples of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka, he investigates how Portugal’s maritime expansion led to the emergence of Luso-Creole groups and languages along the Upper Guinea Coast, the Gulf of Guinea, and South and South-East Asia. Th e latter shared Portuguese features that were adapted in various ways to respond to the given local needs and interests (cf. Alpers 2012). Th e end of the Atlantic slave trade in the Upper Guinea Coast region was due not least to the activities of British and American philanthropists and aboli- tionists (cf. Everill 2013). From the late eighteenth century onward, freed slaves were ‘returned’ from the Americas and England to settle in Sierra Leone and Introduction 3

Liberia. Many Africans were rescued from slave vessels bound for the Americas and came to live along the Upper Guinea Coast (Peterson 1969; Shick 1980). Hence, in most parts of the Upper Guinea Coast, creole groups and categories of people emerged against colonial and philanthropic backdrops. Th eir interaction among themselves as well as with local populations led to the emergence of new identities and sociocultural practices and institutions incorporating features of their respective backgrounds. Th ese populations – such as the Luso-Creole categories of people in Guinea-Bissau, the Krio of Sierra Leone, the Aku of the Gambia, the Americo-Liberians and the citizens of the ‘quatre communes’1 in Senegal – forged intra- and interethnic as well as regional and transnational ties to ensure their own reproduction and to gain and maintain social, economic and political infl uence. Th ey incorporated people of heterogeneous origins from Africa, Europe and the Americas and have often served as intermediaries between peoples of diff erent ethnic, cultural and regional backgrounds. Depending on social and political demands, they distinguished themselves from the indigenous local populations by stressing their relative European-ness or emphasizing the African dimension of their identity to strengthen links with local populations and power holders, not least by marrying women of local descent (Liebenow 1969; Knörr 1995, 2010b; Trajano Filho 1998; Hughes and Perfect 2006; Jones 2013). As Bruce Mouser shows in his contribution on Eurafrican families in the Rio Pongo area of Guinea, creolization also resulted in the establishment of local families who, having integrated into host societies, identifi ed with both their respective local residence and their American or European background. Starting in the late eighteenth century, transcontinental merchants originating in the United States and Great Britain established factories in the Rio Pongo area. Th eir limited number and dispersal throughout the area facilitated their gradual integration into local kin networks and power structures characterized by landlord-stranger relationships (cf. Sarró 2009). Depending on their social contextualization in a given historical situation, creole groups or sections among them have enjoyed elevated status and privileged lifestyles, or suff ered ridicule and discrimination, as the result of their being heterogeneous, (relatively) foreign in origin and more or less distant from (more) native populations (Knörr 1995, 2009a, 2010a, 2010b; cf. Kopytoff 1987; Erik- sen 2002; Geschiere 2009). More often than not, despite their numerical inferiority and often ambivalent status, creole populations managed to play infl uential roles in diff erent sectors of public life in both colonial and postcolonial times. In Guinea-Bissau, for example, creoles were major fi gures in the battle for independence and in the conceptual implementation and political realization of the postcolonial nation state (Trajano Filho 1998; Havik 2004; Kohl 2009, 2011). As elsewhere, they have also contributed signifi cantly to the respective national culture through the languages they speak. In both Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Le- one, creole languages have become lingua francas that are mastered by (almost) 4 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl everyone, thereby functioning as a means of interethnic communication and transethnic and national identifi cation and integration (cf. Vikør 2004). Th e chapters by Bruce Mouser, Nathanial King and Christoph Kohl show that conditions in the Upper Guinea Coast region often facilitated the integration of creole features into social, cultural and political repertoires. Nonetheless, creole groups have often triggered confl ict in relation to exclusionary discourses and policies. Nathaniel King’s contribution explores how marginalized groups and individuals have appropriated so-called secret societies in Freetown for the past six decades. A culture of secrecy is ubiquitous in Sierra Leone, and in Free- town secret societies used to function as a means of social status reproduction by the Krio group (Cohen 1971, 1981). In recent years noncreole and transethnic secret societies have emerged in Freetown as urban counter-institutions. Th eir members are mainly marginalized urban youths and adults using proclaimed Yoruba (hence, Nigerian) origins and related ritual practices as strategic means to increase their social and symbolic powers as well as their political infl uence. Th e contributions in this volume illustrate that whether creole groups and identities play divisive or integrative roles largely depends on their social contextualization within society at large.

Diasporic Entanglements Th roughout its history the Upper Guinea Coast has produced and received diasporas, whose narratives of common origins and destinies constitute a vital dimension of their members’ identities. Slave communities of Upper Guinea Coast origin lived in Portugal (cf. Lahon 1999), in South America (cf. Tardieu 2001) and in the Caribbean (Morgan 2011). Th e notion of diaspora has been discussed controversially. However, at least three identifi able analytical core criteria are widely believed to be constitutive of diasporas. First, most agree that dispersion in space is one crucial element – despite the fact that the division of ethnic communities by state borders may also be a salient criterion. Second, diasporas entail a homeland orientation, though in some cases diasporas are not oriented towards their ancestral homeland. Th ird, boundary maintenance occurs over an extended time period, albeit boundary erosion is an important feature of diasporas, too. Th is analytical understanding contrasts with ‘diaspora’ conceptualized as a sub- stantialized category of practice, serving as a mobilizing, even political vehicle (Brubaker 2005). Early diasporic entanglements in the Upper Guinea Coast region were prompted by the expansion of the Mandingo and Fula empires. European traders’ early settlement along the West African coast and subsequent European colonial penetration of the interior resulted in colonial migrant diasporas. With independence came temporary development workers, diplomats and ‘expatriates’. Vice versa, the (former) European colonial metropolises as well as the United States Introduction 5 and Canada attracted migrants from the Upper Guinea Coast. In recent decades, armed confl icts have produced new categories of forced migrants – refugees and ‘internally displaced persons’ – who sometimes turn into more or less permanent diasporas. Diasporic relations include personal and political ties as well as the exchange of people, money, goods and ideas. Th ey entail networks between individuals and groups, families and nation states, family-run enterprises and consortiums. Diasporic entanglements – patterns of exchange and interaction between ‘diaspora’ and ‘home’ – are manifold and multifaceted. Most studies dealing with diasporas focus on the diasporas as such but less so on their interactions with relatives and friends left behind at ‘home’. Recent research has turned attention to diasporas’ countries and societies of origin, stressing the perceptions, expectations and relationships that migrants experienced in their homeland societies. For instance, a recurring pattern concerns the social status paradoxes of African migration diasporas in the Global North: migrants who enjoyed high prestige in their homelands must now endure low social status in the countries of the Global North, as many of them work at unskilled jobs (Nieswand 2011). Against this background, the chapters by Anita Schroven and Heike Drotbohm are dedicated to the repercussions diasporic communities must confront at ‘home’ and to the contestations and negotiations their (diasporic) roles are subjected to. Anita Schroven analyses the perception of the Guinean transnational community’s engagement in both local and national politics ‘back home’ in Guinea. In doing so, she focuses on transnationals not as agents but as objects of (Guinean) discourses. Heike Drotbohm analyses the interaction between resident islanders and cognate visiting migrants from the United States, who meet during an annual patron saint festivity in Cape Verde. She points to commonalities, such as shared beliefs and origins, and to diff erences as well, like socioeconomic inequalities in the diaspora’s ‘home’. As a major hub for slave ships bound for the New World, Cape Verde was among the places that played a crucial role for the slave trade; the resulting dissemination of Upper Guin- ean social, cultural and even agricultural models (cf. Carney 2001; Fields-Black 2008; Hawthorne 2010) and, consequently, in the making of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993). More recently, the slave trade gave way to more or less voluntary migration, turning the impoverished archipelago into an early migrant labour reservoir par excellence. To this day, young Cape Verdeans search for jobs abroad in North America, Europe and other former Portuguese colonies in Africa. Both forced and voluntary migration have sustainably infl uenced social relationships and contributed to the proliferation and reconfi guration of cultural practices and values, both within the archipelago and across continents. Th is makes Cape Verde a transnational society per se. Drotbohm shows both the ongoing home ‘rootedness’ of migrants and resident islanders’ interest in reproducing relationships with infl uential migrants that hold promise for attaining prestige through the distribution of functions and resources. 6 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

By contrast, Markus Rudolf discusses ways of making diasporas within a country. His study focuses on the case of Senegal, where ‘nordistes’ – inhabitants of the northern part of the country, including the capital Dakar – and Casa- mançais originating from the country’s southernmost region, which has been shattered by violent confl ict for decades, maintain discourses that construct each other as diasporas in the respective counterpart’s territory. In this way, concepts frequently used when discussing diasporas, like ‘country of origin’ and ‘recipient’ country or society, become blurred and contested. Pedro F. Marcelino’s essay examines the perception and stereotyping of various diasporic communities by members of the host society. Over the past decades, Cape Verde has (re-)transformed into a country that attracts migrants. Th e archipelago has been characterized by inward and outward migration since its colonization in the late fi fteenth century, and the resulting heterogeneity led to multiple processes of creolization that made diasporic peoples of European and African descent into Cape Verdeans. As a consequence, it is widely assumed that Cape Verdean creoleness has always been reproduced by integrating culture and identities of diff erent origins. Marcelino questions this assumption, arguing that Cape Verdeans’ attitudes towards immigrants depend on a set of interrelated markers; hence, the varying ‘attractiveness’ of diff erent diasporic communities relates to diff erent degrees of integration, implying diff erent extents of the respective boundary maintenance and boundary erosion.

Travelling Models After the offi cial termination of the Sierra Leonean Civil War in 2002, a Special Court for Sierra Leone was set up by the Sierra Leonean government and the United Nations to bring individuals responsible for war crimes to justice (An- ders 2009). Simultaneously – and as in other postwar countries like Liberia and Guinea-Bissau – peace-building programmes devoting attention to former child soldiers and ex-combatants were established conjointly by the Sierra Leonean government, the United Nations, the international community, development agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Th e norms and values guiding these peace-building initiatives have functioned as global ‘travelling models’ that compete with more local practices and beliefs concerning the (re-) establishment of peace and order (Knörr and Trajano Filho 2010; Knörr 2010b). Following actor-network theory, as developed by Bruno Latour (2005), and organizational sociology approaches (e.g. Czarniawska and Joerges 1996), ‘travelling models’ are conceived as ideas and practices that are transferred into diverging social, cultural, political and geographic settings, where they are recontextual- ized, hence embedded and translated into new contexts (see e.g. Merry 2006; cf. Knörr 2007, 2014). Such travelling ideas and practices (i.e. narrative structures; trains of thought; beliefs; programmes; legal and normative orders) may become Introduction 7 materialized in printed documents, pictures, artefacts or voyagers, amongst others. In their new context or ‘web of belief’ (Quine and Ullian 1978) ‘travelling models’ are subject to innovations and transformations that involve processes of ‘translation’ (Kaufmann and Rottenburg 2012) and ‘“de-strangement” of the external culture via its (meaningful) incorporation into what is familiar’ (cf. Knörr’s [2007: 33] elaborations on the ‘Ent-fremdung des Fremden’; Knörr 2014). Such processes of translation, transformation and de-strangement impact both the (travelling) ideas and practices as such and the contexts from which they originated and into which they are incorporated. For centuries European presence was limited to relatively small coastal settlements along the Upper Guinea Coast. Only from the early nineteenth century onwards did colonial penetration of the hinterland get under way, whereupon old and new colonial powers alike tried to impose their respective ideological models of colonization and domination, which had in common the belief in European supremacy. Th e emerging colonial orders introduced techniques to control, subjugate and divide indigenous populations, leading to reconfi gurations of political structures, alliances and identifi cations, and to new waves of migrations within the region (see Galli and Jones 1987; van der Laan 1992). At the same time, reward systems created new prospects of social upward mobility for some sections of colonial society, whose members adapted to its demands to varying degrees. European colonial metropolises became increasingly attractive in terms of educational and economic opportunities. Hence, earlier patterns of West Africans’ presence in cities like London (‘Black Poor’) and Lisbon (Braidwood 1994; Rod- rigues 1999) continued, yet were transformed. Formal European education contributed to the spread of ‘undesired’ anti- colonial and nationalist ideologies among the emerging African middle class, among them many members of creole minorities. Writings such as those of the Caribbean-born Americo-Liberian Edward Wilmot Blyden (cf. Tibebu 2012), the African-American pan-Africanist and civil rights activist W.E.B. du Bois (du Bois 2012) and Jamaican Marcus Garvey (see Grant 2009) were received favourably among intellectual circles in the region (and beyond). Pan-Africanist and proto-nationalist movements – some of them branches of metropolitan organizations – led by members of the educated African middle class served as models of modern nationhood from about 1910 onwards. Postcolonial state ideology built heavily on material and ideological support from communist and socialist states in Eastern Europe and Asia. In Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, nationalist leaders referred to the modernist and socialist models of governance in vogue at the time (Cabral 1976, 1977; Diallo 1990). As in other parts of the postcolonial world, many political leaders in the Upper Guinea Coast region adapted the classic French model of nationhood that equates state, nation and culture (see Gellner 1998; Hobsbawm 1999). However, they had to cope with the facts that in their case – and unlike the European ideal type of nationhood – 8 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl state building had preceded nation-building, and postcolonial society remained characterized by ethnic diversity and allegiances. Th is challenge prompted some leaders, for instance Amílcar Cabral (1976), leader of Guinea-Bissau’s dominant independence movement, to adjust the European nation-building concept to postcolonial conditions by providing it with a ‘unity-in-diversity’ dimension that conceives of the nation as an umbrella covering the various ethnic groups living on the respective national territory. Vice versa, this model tends to conceptualize ethnic groups and identities as the respective nation’s roots, without which the latter cannot unfold (see Anderson 1999; Kymlicka 2004; Young 2004; Knörr 2007, 2008, 2009b). Th e former colonial powers continued to have a major impact on postcolonial developments. Independence went along with the provision of development cooperation programmes that refl ected both hegemonic and philanthropic motives – prominently involving the former colonial powers – against the background of the East-West confl ict. While both political camps sought to disseminate their supposedly superior ideologies, African leaders adapted them to local conditions as well as their own political needs. Initially, development cooperation likewise followed modernist and neo-Marxist approaches, aiming to reproduce the Euro- pean and North American unilateral path towards economic development and industrialization in the Upper Guinea Coast region and elsewhere in the so-called Th ird World. Colonial domination, development aid, economic structural adjustment and international law, along with security and peace-building reforms, in- and outward migration, and the expansion of media technologies, have all infl uenced societies in the Upper Guinea Coast region (and beyond) through concepts, ideas and practices related to and travelling with them. However, these fl ows are not unidirectional from the North to the South but rather proceed in a zig- zag fashion whose travel itinerary often is not traceable, as organization theory (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996) has emphasized. In his contribution, Wilson Trajano Filho traces the transatlantic semantic journey of the word tabanka, showing that origins other than Upper Guinean ones are conceivable since similar words exist in Angola, Congo, Central Africa, Hispanic America and the French-speaking Caribbean. Th e analysis shows that tracing the origins of travelling words and meanings is often highly speculative, if not impossible. Th e chapter may also be read as a warning against simple linear source-recipient transfer models (cf. Djelic 2008). Th e Upper Guinea Coast has been integrated into global networks for centuries, but the quality of its globalization has changed in recent times. Th e role of nonstate actors – notably supranational, transnational and economic organizations (e.g. nongovernmental institutions and enterprises) – has increased, as has the number of new actors from countries of the Global South, such as China Introduction 9 and Brazil. Employment and education opportunities in the Americas, Europe and Asia in combination with new and improved communication and trans- port networks have enabled growing numbers of Upper Guineans to keep in (virtual) touch with other parts of the world and to travel abroad. Nonetheless, the Global North’s exercise of power by disseminating values and ideas often coined as ‘Western’ sometimes provokes resistance to what are perceived as acts of ‘cultural imperialism’ and ‘neocolonialism’, even as Western lifestyles, consumer goods, media and education attract people in the Global South and challenge local ways and traditions of (re-)structuring social, political and economic life. As Latour (2005), Kaufmann and Rottenburg (2012) and theorists of globalization like Appadurai (1996) and Hannerz (2002) have underlined, such travelling models are translated in ways that fi t the local sociocultural contexts into which they are integrated, a process Robertson (1995) termed ‘glocalization’ (cf. Knörr 2002, 2009a, 2010a, 2014). Increasing criticism of the failure of many development projects that came to be known as ‘white elephants’ clearly illustrated that models that had succeeded in the Global North could not simply be applied one-to-one in African contexts. Th e exacerbation of debt crisis and the resulting Washington Consensus in the 1980s2 exposed the Upper Guinea Coast region to even more economic and fi scal interventions by supranational institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which pushed economic reforms that in many cases led to deregulation policies and aggravated socioeconomic disparities. Joanna Davidson’s chapter presents an example of nontranslation of Global North concepts. On the basis of her fi eld research in Northern Guinea-Bissau, she discusses the sociocultural, political, economic and ecological dimensions of insuffi cient rice cultivation among the Diola against the backdrop of climate change. Besides telling the story of international actors’ neglect and disregard of the sociocultural and political embedding of rice cultivation, Davidson points to the nontranslation of technology, that is, to development research schemes oriented to social engineering (see Scott 1998). Her chapter on the global warming-induced changes in rice growing contributes to the understanding of how international professionals’ planning largely ignores local sociocultural patterns, expectations and demands while employing large-scale Global North technologies believed to be superior and in no need of adaptation to local contexts. Following the model set by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission since the mid 1990s, ‘local’ solutions to resolve postconfl ict situations and reconcile off enders and victims have come into vogue, in line with international norm-setting agencies’ (e.g. the UN’s and OECD’s) demands for increased ‘local ownership’ (see Donais 2009). Th is global discourse and its local manifestation are tackled by William P. Murphy in this volume. Dealing with the return of refugees and internally displaced people in postconfl ict Liberia and 10 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

Sierra Leone, he confronts the international discourse of postconfl ict reconciliation with confl icting local expectations and ideas of social justice. Murphy points to the problematic fact that both the Sierra Leone Truth and Recon- ciliation Commission3 and international law more generally tend to identify individuals as those responsible for war crimes without addressing the existing neopatrimonial institutional structures of injustice as a whole. Again, international reconciliatory approaches, discourses and practices do not seem to be well translated into local contexts. Similar observations pertain to other realms of Sierra Leone’s postwar society. Supra- and transnational actors engaged in supporting the country’s media sector with an eye to strengthening civic rights often fail to adequately take local conditions into consideration and ‘translate’ their approaches and concepts accordingly, a topic dealt with by Sylvanus Spencer in this volume. Since the establishment of peace a decade ago, the right to freedom of expression has turned into a contested space, or even a ‘battleground’, in postwar Sierra Leone. Spencer shows that transnational organizations involved in the discourse focus on the formal legal system and fail to consider customary law in the interior, thereby ignoring the eff ects of the bifurcate legal system. Another translational weakness he identifi es is that civic education programmes promoting freedom of expression are unaware of cultural obstacles to talking freely, such as the culture of secrecy so prominent in most parts of the Upper Guinea Coast region (cf. King 2012). Another issue that has drawn much attention from both scholars and development workers is that of youth and warfare in Upper Guinea Coast societies. Following, amongst others, Ellis’ (1999) monograph on religious dimensions of youths’ involvement in the Liberian war and works by Utas (2003), Shepler (2005) and Coulter (2009) on former youth combatants, as well as Vigh’s (2006) publication on youth and soldiering in Guinea-Bissau’s ‘military confl ict’, Susan Shepler’s contribution examines the global fl ow of child protection models, challenging – as do Murphy and Spencer – the widely accepted view that expertise trickles from the top down, that is, from the Global North to various peripheries in the South, a view that implies that local agents are bound to their locations, as Merry (2006), for instance, assumed. Expertise, Shepler concludes, is mainly about introducing a new expert language that fi xes Sierra Leoneans in a hierarchical position, tacitly implying that they did not previously know how to take care of children. As in Murphy’s case, a North-South power asymmetry becomes apparent where international NGOs seek ‘traditional’ child healing rituals that may well exist in other settings, but not in Sierra Leone. Such asymmetries also exist where child protection organizations commodify former child soldiers in order to attract funds. However, local Sierra Leoneans are not mere powerless objects of a top-down trickle of ideas. Th ey learn the ‘newspeak’ of child expertise to take advantage of project activities and build careers within the international ‘child Introduction 11 protection expertise’ sector as ‘locals’ assumed to be experts on ‘local contexts’ anywhere in the Global South.

Interregional Integration State borders between West African countries are relatively young, dating back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. People in the Upper Guinea Coast region have maintained contacts with their neighbours across these borders ever since they were drawn. Th ey often have much in common in terms of ethnic identities, cultural features and historical experience. However, identifi cation with the respective nation states has grown due to social, cultural, political and linguistic commonalities that developed out of specifi c colonial and postcolonial circumstances and experiences. Ethnic groups identify with ‘their’ nation-state to varying degrees, and some ethnic identities correspond to a given national identity more than others do (Højbjerg, Knörr and Kohl 2012; Knörr and Tra- jano Filho 2010). Ethnic or local identities may also be situated in opposition to the nation-state, as in the case of the Casamançais, mentioned above. Th e Mandingos and the Fulas are examples of ethnic groups that are scattered over a handful of West African states and maintain particular, regionalized sub-identifi cations while also identifying with their respective nation-state. Research has demonstrated how colonially drawn interstate borders in West Africa have, in the long run, shaped perceptions of belonging (cf. Nugent 2008). Against these backgrounds, Christian K. Højbjerg investigates the role of Mandingo identity in local confl icts in the border triangle of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where, as he concludes, common war experiences have led to a simplifi cation of people’s consciousness of processes related to Mandingo identity. Outbreaks of violence in the respective countries have often been attributed to a strengthening of transnational Mandingo identity and Mandingo expansion into new areas where they come into confl ict with fi rst-come ethnic groups (cf. Kopytoff 1987). Th is makes ethnic loyalties and diff erences responsible for what are often designated as ‘ethnic clashes’ (against this view, see Schlee 2008; Donahoe et al. 2009). According to Højbjerg, however, (transnational) Mandingo identity has strengthened only during the protracted wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, which prompted ‘taking sides’ and a stronger ethnic consciousness among Mandingos (and possibly other groups) on the one hand, and a coarsening and weakening of peaceful confl ict resolution mechanisms on the other. Colonization not only created new territory-related, protonational points of reference but also fostered transcolonial relationships that have given rise to specifi c transnational identifi cations and networks. For example, Sierra Leone and the Gambia were both British colonies. Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Liberia are linked by the settlement of diff erent groups of liberated slaves and also share their offi cial language. Today, air links 12 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl between these three countries are relatively frequent, and connecting fl ights exist to other anglophone countries in West Africa, namely Ghana and Nigeria. Flying directly from Sierra Leone or Liberia to Guinea-Bissau, however, is impossible, despite the proximity. Flight schedules, it seems, refl ect the intensity of mutual contact and exchange among the inhabitants of the respective nation-states. Th us, as this case exemplifi es, colonial boundaries have produced new (transethnic) identifi cations with the given colonial territory, laying the foundation for the postcolonial nation-states, but ethnic identifi cations and diff erences have nonetheless prevailed. Th e emerging identifi cations with newly created colonial territories were paralleled by emergent transcolonial identifi cations within the respective colonial empires that were based on shared (colonial) history and language, family ties, educational backgrounds, cultural representations and so on. Internal socioeconomic disparities as well as social and political exclusion were among the causes of the wars that broke out in diff erent countries within the region from the 1980s onwards (Richards 1996; Ellis 1999; Coulter 2009). However, these wars also had distinct regional and global dimensions. Th e Sierra Leonean Civil War was sparked by Charles Taylor’s rebels entering the country from Liberia and also aff ected neighbouring Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire. Both the bordering Guinea-Bissau and Gambia have reportedly been involved in the Casa- mance confl ict, and in 1998/99 Senegal, Guinea and France engaged in Guinea- Bissau’s civil war (e.g. van der Drift 1999; Rodrigues and Guillerme 2005). Th e societies of the Upper Guinea Coast were transnationally and globally connected well before and during the respective wars. In her contribution, Al- ice Bellagamba uncovers mid-twentieth-century transnational trade relationships and the establishment of neopatrimonial networks both within the region and beyond by examining the life story of a Gambian diamond dealer – a scion of a precolonial Senegambian Mandingo trading elite of Malian origin. She describes how this entrepreneur became engaged in trading activities in Sierra Leone and Liberia, making use of Jewish and Lebanese trading networks, amongst others, to later extend his trade to Congo, Europe and Israel before returning to the Upper Guinea Coast. Bellagamba underlines the common ground between Brit- ish colonies, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, and networks of older, precolonially rooted Mande-speaking communities that facilitated the social and occupational integration of transnational traders. Bellagamba’s biographical account reveals how ethnic, genealogical and professional continuities across national boundaries helped to establish patrimonial relationships that functioned to smooth individual trading activities. Th e illicit international trade with (‘blood’) diamonds and tropical woods in Liberia and Sierra Leone in exchange for arms and ammunition, and the use of arms smuggled, inter alia, through Guinea-Bissau by Casamançais rebel fi ghters are abhorrent examples of the region’s global connectedness. However, as Bella- Introduction 13 gamba’s and Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta’s contributions suggest, present- day trade and migration models revert to some extent to a premodern state of transnational network patterns of the past. Th ey demonstrate how the Casa- mance was integrated into a global web of trade in blade weapons that linked it not only with Europe but also with North Africa, Latin America and the Indian Ocean. In the early nineteenth century, a trade in fi rearms emerged in the Casa- mance, involving both French and British trading posts along the Casamance and Gambia Rivers. Mark and da Silva Horta’s chapter depicts the changing trade pattern in the Casamance, indicating that trading activities were far more globalized and Africans were far more active agents within them than commonly thought. Representing early examples of ‘technoscapes’ (Appadurai 1996), these trading activities thereby substantiate the claim that one may speak of globalization in the region well before the late twentieth century. More recently, drug traffi cking has turned parts of the Upper Guinea Coast – such as Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Guinea – into hubs for cocaine shipped from Latin America to Europe (Ellis 2009; Krech 2011). Other forms of globalized transnational economic activities in the region have received less attention. Indian wholesale buyers, for instance, annually return to Guinea-Bissau and Senegal to purchase cashew harvests that are subsequently processed in South Asia before being marketed in the Global North (Kohl, observation based on recent fi eld research). Over the past decades, Cape Verde, Gambia and Senegal have evolved as nascent tourist destinations, entailing the commodifi cation of culture through staged performances (de Jong 2007) and the attraction of young, urban, unemployed men and women who off er various services to tourists, including sex services. Th e more recent global entanglements of the Upper Guinea Coast include Mauritanian, Nigerian and Chinese migrants who settle in the region to serve various lines of business. By contrast, the settling of Lebanese shopkeepers and traders can be traced back more than a century. In many cases, long-established intraregional trade routes coexist with new trade channels, linking mainland Upper Guinea with Cape Verde and Brazil, for instance. In political terms, the Upper Guinea Coast is well entrenched in regional organizations, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Th e region also continues to be integrated in transcontinental, intergovernmental organizations that function as successor institutions to former colonial empires, such as the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), the Com- monwealth of Nations and the International Organisation of La Francophonie (OIF). To conclude, this anthology comes full circle, discussing the global connectedness of the Upper Guinea Coast from diff erent points of view to outline how the region has been part of global fl ows and exchanges stretching far beyond the context of a ‘Black Atlantic’. 14 Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

Notes 1. Born in the four Franco-Senegalese towns of Gorée Island, Dakar, Ruﬁ sque and Saint- Louis, the African and métis inhabitants of these ‘four communes’ enjoyed – at least de jure – full French citizenship rights. 2. ‘Washington Consensus’ denotes a set of policies promoted by the Bretton Wood institutions and the United States. Th ese policies encompass macroeconomic stabilization of national economies and their opening to foreign trade and investments, as well as privat- ization of state assets and the unleashing of market forces. 3. Th e commission was established following the 1999 Lomé Peace Accord. Installed by Sierra Leone and the international community, it aimed at an impartial coming to terms with abuses and violence committed during the Sierra Leonean Civil War (1991–2002) and intended to reconcile the warring sides and prevent further violence.

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Chapter 1 Towards a Deﬁ nition of Transnational as a Family Construct A Historical and Micro Perspective Bruce L. Mouser

Defi nitions Current literature amply demonstrates that ‘transnational’ is an imprecise and overused term. For the purpose of this study of trader families on the West African coast and their charter generations, transnational is used in two ways. Transna- tional families contain a primary component on the African mainland. Th ey have family branches living and working in diff erent countries, and those branches interact with each other and are aware of each other’s existence. Th ey identify themselves as transnational or are identifi ed by others as transnational. Th eir more successful branches travel to distant places, study abroad, speak several languages, and are open to the pan-Atlantic market of products and ideas. Multi- sitedness across national borders and group cohesion are critical components in this defi nition of the term. Th e second defi nition is more complicated because it involves a self- or other- imposed identity that may transcend or reject ethnic or national membership. In the African context, this may include any prominent cultural or physiological characteristic that separates a group from the majority population, stigmatizes its members for being diff erent, or denies them ethnic membership or even a path to membership. Intermarriage among members within such a group increases the group’s self-identity of separateness as well as the impression among others that the group is exclusive, closed, separate and hostile. A manifestation of these two defi nitions is the emergence of a creolized group with character and genetic traits that it borrows or modifi es from many sources. Grey Gundaker (2000: 125) suggests that Europeans who arrived on the African coast as traders and who expected to remain and raise families there ‘made the most of similarities’ between their own systems and those of their 22 Bruce L. Mouser hosts. Th ey either accommodated to the cultural norms of the majority population or produced a self-identifi ed hybrid or creolized and multiethnic culture that was denied ethnic membership. To explain how some Europeans and their métis families were able to fuse with or accommodate to the dominant population and over time obtain membership and privilege as power-sharing newcomers, Donald Levine (1979) developed a typology that identifi ed stages through which strangers moved to acquire either newcomer status or marginality as a stigmatized and self-identifi ed hybrid and separate group.

Historical Background Between 1750 and 1850 (the approximate date for the ‘eff ective’ end of slave trading from the Rio Pongo), more than seventy American and European slave traders had settled at the Rio Pongo and remained there long enough to produce off spring that carried their surnames. Th ey became a part of a uidfl ‘African-Euro- pean frontier’ or zone of interconnectedness emerging upon the coast (Coifman 1994; Hannerz 1997). Some of these traders died in their fi rst years, succumb- ing to diseases, fevers and parasites of the coast, but many others survived and stayed to establish large families and create and join networks of trader families. A select number of these families or their most commercially successful branches became multi-sited, with units operating on the Nunez and Pongo Rivers and residences maintained in Liverpool, England; Charleston, South Carolina; Ha- vana or Matanzas in Cuba; and in one case Boston, Massachusetts. In 1820, Commander Sir G. H. Collier of the Royal Navy described those in the Pongo as:

the surviving few of some hundreds of original [‘Company of Royal] Adventurers1 [Trading to Africa’], of hardy constitutions, rude habits, and little education, [who] were well calculated for the task they had undertaken; they assimilated themselves to the manners and customs of the Country, and soon became powerful as Chiefs. By marriages with the native Women they had large families, a guarantee for their respect to the customs of the Country, and a pledge for their personal continuance in it; thus consolidating their interest, and uniting their fate with that of the Country…Th eir children are of course mulattoes.2

Jehudi Ashmun (Gurley 1933: 347) wrote in 1827 simply that these traders had ‘allied themselves, by something, which in Africa, passes as marriage, with the most powerful native families, and are the proprietors of slaves’. More than a century later, Monsignor Raymond-René Lerouge (Congrégation du Société Esprit)3 described such an arrangement in less ﬂ attering terms, neglecting to indicate that his interpretation contained all that was necessary to establish marital legitimacy in the Pongo context: Deﬁ ning Transnational as a Family Construct 23

One day, we learn that the neighbouring chief sold him one of his daughters (girls) for several spans of Guinea cloth, a few bottles of rum, [and] a few pounds of gunpowder. Th is woman, with great fanfare, is introduced into the stranger’s bedchamber. After a few months, a child is born of this stranger’s house. Th is is the ‘mixed race’, the true métis of the ﬁ rst generation: father white, mother native. A [new] species is founded.

To be sure, the founders of transnational families in the Pongo lacked sophis- tication and decorum, for they were engaged in the lowest of commerces – slave trading. Moreover, according to Meneses (1987: 231–33), they were operating in an environment of ‘a good deal of real hostility’. Th ey represented a threat of potential enslavement and were ‘at best disliked and at worst hated’ by the majority population. As a minority, they were ‘freed from the usual obligation of generosity and kindness’. Some came to establish factories and become businessmen on the coast; some arrived seeking only employment in factories established by others. Nearly all arrived at the Pongo without relatives or a spouse, and they sought – as did their hosts – to remedy that deﬁ ciency as quickly as possible. Whatever their motives for remaining in the Pongo, they had to follow local custom if they intended to obtain a wife or partner. One method was to purchase a slave outright and use her as a mistress (Flezar 2009: 67; Brooks 2010: 95). But although that was permitted, it removed the river’s ‘land kings’ (who regulated the use of land) and ‘political kings’ (involved in social and political interactions) from the ‘wifegiving’ process. It also created a problem for stigmatized oﬀ spring,

Map 1.1. Rio Pongo 24 Bruce L. Mouser who in addition to being descendants ‘of the Saxon race’ were also descendants of slave mothers and therefore did not have locally recognized succession and inheritance rights (Conneau 1976: 107; Th ayer 1978). Partnering with a slave woman also produced diffi culties in the global or pan-Atlantic context, where a person classifi ed as a slave was ineligible to inherit property (Kennedy-Hafl ett 1996; Flezar 2009: 67–68). Th e preferred pattern involved a marriage linked to a comprehensive understanding between parties in landlord/stranger or uncle/nephew relationships (Sarró 2009: 51–55; Diallo 1970; Mouser 1975). Marriage was advantageous to both parties: it permitted the host to tap into his stranger’s market while opening his own to the guest (Ballard 2001: 6–8). As host of a European or American, a landholder, especially if he also had political authority, expected any guest to accept a contractual arrangement that stipulated, among many things economic, how a stranger might interact with the host’s other subjects. Th ese included women, who were bargaining chips to be used within patron/client relationships, whether those involved Europeans from the Atlantic or Africans from the interior. A stranger sealed his trading contract with money or a marriage, and likely both (Conneau 1976: 107–11; Mouser 1975). Upon entering the river’s commerce, protocol required the stranger to approach the local headman and ask permission to visit his town and territory (Harrell-Bond and Rijnsdorp 1976: 26; Almada 1984 [1594]). Small gifts were exchanged. After an appropriate interval, the topic of trading would be raised; now the discussion assumed a more formal character because land use was involved. Land and political headmen and even elders in secret societies would need to be consulted and compensated for the stranger’s privilege to operate within a regional context (Conneau 1976: 109). Eventually an agreement was reached between hosts and guest, with obligations clearly stipulated for all parties. Th e money part of the arrangement included the semblance of a purchase or lease of land upon which the stranger built his trading factory. Only the buildings and improvements belonged to the trader. Th e contract set rents for land use and fees for wharf usage, water rights, burial duties and import and export taxes. Other provisions defi ned a range of allowed activities and mobility, as well as requirements (gunpowder and warriors) the guest/ stranger provided his host/landlord in case the latter was attacked by an enemy or a rival family (CMS CAI/E3/99; CMS CAI/E4/127; Mouser 1996: 88–89; Mouser and Mouser 2003: 56). Th ese arrangements affi rmed that land could not be alienated through sale, that strangers and their descendants could never become newcomers, and that the only ruling authority belonged to landlords/hosts or those holding land rights, as permitted by secret societies (Sarró 2009: 54–59). As long as the arriving stranger recognized those principles and accepted a subalternated position within the indigenous society, he could expect that his person, property and family would be Defi ning Transnational as a Family Construct 25 protected, that he would be governed by his own rules within his household, and that his host or hosts would not interfere in his business, unless his contract permitted it. A disadvantage of this arrangement for the stranger was the lack of choice. Th e landlord, as ‘wifegiver’, presented his guest with a daughter or ‘girl’ that the stranger was obliged to accept, for to refuse would challenge the wifegiver’s status and authority and identify the stranger as an intruder or outsider who had little interest in sharing his fortune with his host or hosts (Conneau 1976: 68, 107; Chauveau and Richards 2008: 519). By gifting a classifi catory sister or daughter, the wifegiver also positioned a spy in the house of his stranger and produced a set of obligations something like those of an uncle/nephew relationship. Th e only decision falling to the ‘wifetaker’ was the scale of ceremony attached to the marriage. Th e higher the station of the wife, the more expensive would be the marriage ritual (Conneau 1976: 108; Graf 1998: 16, 35). Th eophilus Conneau, a French trader who worked at a factory in the upper Pongo in the 1830s, claimed that his Euro-African employer maintained a sera- glio of more than thirty wives and mistresses, some of whom made themselves available to strangers visiting the river (Conneau 1976: 64). Nearly two and a half centuries earlier, André Álvares de Almada (1594) reported that a visiting stranger in the Pongo was asked to pick one female from his host’s harem and leave the rest of his host’s wives alone for the duration of his visit. In eff ect this was an attempt to minimize negative consequences and métis children that might result from contact with a person with less desirable racial traits (Goff man 1963; Kivel 2002: 122–23; Johnson 2005: 33). And children did result: others reported that there always were ‘masterless’ and free métis eager to attach themselves to a patron (Th ayer 1981b: 15, 20; Mouser and Mouser 2003: 27, 82, 86). Still another variant involved companionship as a benefi t a trader provided to those Europeans who took jobs in his factory. Conneau reported that he received wages of one slave per month, meals from the kitchens of his employer’s wives and ‘a private establishment with the accessories not necessary to mention’ (Conneau 1976: 66). Whatever the form of marriage or union, children inevitably appeared. Th ese were the métis of the charter generation. When a trader succeeded fi nancially, other of his hosts noticed the advantages of proximity and gifted daughters of their own to seal arrangements with this successful stranger. Family size could quickly become large, depending on how many wives the guest received and particular rules governing child-rearing and breastfeeding. Benjamin Curtis Sr. at Kissing, for instance, was reported to have produced more than fi fty children during the twenty-three years he lived in the Pongo (Foreign Offi ce 1830: 8:848). Th is fi rst generation of mixed European and African children – the Euro-Africans – was perhaps least problematic, except those fathered by strangers who died during the fi rst rainy season. Th eir mothers were African, and some may have been ‘royals’ or the free daughters of headmen and landholders. If wives were Susu, who were 26 Bruce L. Mouser patrilineal and patrilocal, they would look to their husband’s lineage to fi nd their ‘refuge’ when catastrophe struck, but since in these cases there typically was no lineage belonging to such a husband, a wife could appeal only to her father, to a fi ctive lineage composed of non-Africans similar to her husband, or to the factory operator (Conneau 1976: 67–68; Harrell-Bond and Rijnsorp 1976: 7–9; Th ayer 1981a: 41–42; Th ayer 1983: 119; McLachlan 1999: 15). As in most cultures, fi rst-generation children grew up in houses kept by their mothers (Harrell-Bond and Rijnsorp 1976: 21–22). Th eir close kinship cousins were those belonging to their mother’s side, for in this instance their fathers’ relatives were absent. Th e identity of siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts and relations became complicated by defi nitions that were imprecise and set by proximity and local practice. Th ey spoke the language(s) of their mother(s) on the playground and that of their father in the marketplace, especially when dealing with Euro- peans. Some from the more commercially successful branches of trader families attended European schools (at Freetown, London, Liverpool, Havana, Matanzas, Charleston or – when the Pongo began to slip into a French sphere of infl uence after 1850 – Gorée or Saint Louis in Senegal), and they obtained self-identifi ed membership in those worlds or were stigmatized by others as belonging to those less desirable worlds. Th eir principal playmates were the sons and daughters of other traders, for it was with them that they shared the most time, proximity and characteristics. Th ose of the fi rst generations were light-skinned and carried European features. Th ey had stakes in three civilizations: that of their fathers, that of their mothers and the civilization of the métis. In 1821, for instance, Brian O’Beirne of Freetown described William Lawrence of Domingia, who was at least a third-generation Euro-African descendent, as ‘a person dressed in Nan- keen Jacket and Trowsers and who, although nearly as dark as many around him, had the features of a good looking European’ (O’Beirne 1979: 224–25). Many strangers died during the fi rst rainy season. If children and a wife were left behind, the mother might take their off spring to her father’s compound, or she might seek an alliance or marital relationship with another trader. Th at happened with Phenda, who married John Fraser at the Îles de Los in 1799 (Schafer 1999). Another possibility was to continue her former husband’s enterprise, with the considerable help of friends or kin (Th ayer 1983). Any widow might avail herself of this option, but there had to be a male protector (husband’s brother or son) to whom she was ultimately responsible, at least nominally. She might acquire ‘Big Man’ status and command respect and authority, but only so long as she was able to maintain discipline within her husband’s extended family, of which she might be the senior or most respected member (Th ayer 1979: 63–64). Th at happened with the widow of John Ormond Sr., who remained a powerful voice within Ormond family interests in the upper Pongo for nearly two decades after her husband’s death until her son John Ormond Jr. returned from London to reclaim his father’s position in river commerce (Conneau 1976). Defi ning Transnational as a Family Construct 27

Some of these children found themselves further isolated by colour, physical features and European fi rst names. Th eir hue stigmatized them as European by locals and as African by traders. Th e Rev. Peter Hartwig, who lived in Freetown and Sumbuya from 1804 to 1815, described the dilemma encountered by a widowed mother of métis children, suggesting that she ‘is often so circumstanced [and her children so stigmatized] that she is forced to leave them [off spring] at the factory’ (Mouser and Mouser 2003: 86). Inevitably, some of these children found attach- ment and employment with European traders or with others of mixed race, such as the Luso-Africans. Almada (1594) wrote simply that ‘if one [child] happens to be begotten by a white, he [the host] gives it to the father who takes it away’. Th e above description of marriage practice and kinship, however, relates only to newly arriving strangers. Not all strangers arrived at the same time or even during the same decades. Documentation of arriving traders is best for the last decade of the eighteenth century and the fi rst two decades of the nineteenth. In that thirty-year span it is fi rst possible to observe the characteristics of a separate transnational community of traders and families moving through stages of acceptance or denial. Of the two families sampled in this study, one founder arrived in the Rio Pongo in the mid-1760s and the other in the fi rst decade of the 1800s. In that forty-year span, the evidence suggests that founders, unless they came as employees of factors, conformed to the pattern of mandatory marriage linked to landlord/stranger agreements. Only in the second and following generations did the issue of creole identity appear, a consequence of increasing numbers of Euro-African descendants who claimed membership in trader families, who were identifi ed as ‘mulattoes’ by missionaries operating schools in the river and as persons lacking ethnically assigned rights by locals, and had reached diff erent levels of assimilation or acculturation with the host society. Th e problem of self-identity was less acute among elite branches of trader families that owned and operated factories, prodigiously intermarried and obtained education in religious and foreign schools. Th is group also travelled abroad, maintained pan-Atlantic residences and held economic infl uence and resources unimagined by local political and land kings. Being transnational granted this elite group a degree of independence from local customs and rituals, but it was obtained at a price. Th is included a ‘formal’ subordinate relationship with hosts and an understanding that descendants neither might nor could ever aspire to authority, even though they often exercised as much relative power as did hosts, or more. Th e level of education attained and travels undertaken by métis family members were important variables infl uencing the growth of their transnational or hybrid identity in a world characterized by ‘zones where cultures meet’ (Hannerz 1997: 3). In the 1780s, British companies operating from Bance Island in Sierra Leone and at the Îles de Los had sent upwards of seventy sons and daughters of headmen and traders to Liverpool, expecting them ‘to learn Sense and get a good Head’4 and to return to the African coast as agents of Atlantic and European 28 Bruce L. Mouser commerce (Graf 1998: 15; Brooks 2003: 298). Among those attending school in Liverpool from the Pongo were John Holman Jr., Emmanuel Gomez and Wil- liam Jellorum Fernandez. Elizabeth Cleveland of Banana Islands at Sierra Leone, whose brother John also had studied in Liverpool, migrated to Charleston. Th ere, with money from her brother, she purchased a plantation and opened a school for African youths (Koger 2006: 54; Montgomery 2007). John Ormond Jr. lived in London for more than a decade before being impressed for fi ve years into the British navy, during which time he travelled in the Mediterranean and among the Caribbean islands. In 1799, Governor Zachary Macaulay took twenty-one children – fi ve of them from the Pongo – to London, where they attended a school at Clapham Common (Mouser 2004: 96–99). When the British established a colony at Sierra Leone, traders from the Pongo and Nunez sent children to board there for their education. Opportunities for travel and education abroad for métis from the Pongo continued in the nineteenth century. Jellorum Harrison of Fallangia spent several years in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he helped Henry Brunton produce the fi rst Susu grammar and dictionary (Brunton 1802) before travelling through Cen- tral Asia for more than a decade, after which he travelled in the Americas (Hair 1962). In 1812, James Fraser was attending school in Charleston, South Car- olina, while his sister Margaret was living with the Powell family in Liverpool. Traders sent children to schools to study Spanish in Matanzas and Havana in Cuba, as Spanish-speaking slave markets then dominated the trade in the Amer- icas. In 1817, a French captain visited the Pongo, recruiting students to a newly opened school for African youths in the West Indies; one headman sent two of his sons (Mouser 2000). Th ese lengthy encounters with other cultures inclined family members who experienced them to adopt a fl exible notion of citizenship (Ong 1999) which, while widening their world view, may also have narrowed their recognition of their own membership in any group. Between 1808 and 1817, the presence in the Pongo itself of schools founded by missionaries and teachers of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) had a major, immediate impact upon trader families’ transition to a separate and hybrid status. Th ese schools created a ‘social [and physical] space’ (Drotbohm 2009: 133; Góis 2005: 265–66) in which another type of membership might develop and accelerated changes already occurring among elite groups of traders’ children. In Butscher’s list of fi fty-two children attending the CMS’s Bashia School in 1811, for instance, thirty-six were described as mulattoes and forty-four carried European surnames.5 Th irty were males. Ages ranged from 5 to 18, although eighteen students in 1811 were among the group aged 12 to 16 (CMS CAI/E2/ 103). When schools began in 1808, missionaries required students to use only the Susu language, but in 1809 they changed to English instruction, largely at the insistence of traders, who were paying tuition and expected schools to provide a foundation useful in Atlantic commerce. Defi ning Transnational as a Family Construct 29

In these schools students boarded together for extended periods, forming lasting friendships. Th e schools reinforced the European view that whites were superior to blacks and that métis children were a mongrel race, thus adding to their stigma. Th ey were separated from siblings and relatives who remained in family compounds. If they remained in school long enough, their world view became at least partly that held by missionaries, their role models. Th at world view could expand to encompass pan-Atlantic commerce and business techniques, travel to foreign places (especially following the introduction of regular packet services), study of foreign languages and use of foreign manufactures (Coifman 1994; Mouser 2009). Many if not most converted to Christianity, which further separated them from their indigenous relatives and from family members born to less successful branches. Many of them married classmates, resulting in an intermarried generation with the CMS and the Anglican Church as their social and cultural base. Some married in the ‘country fashion’ and without church sanction, but others fulfi lled both requirements (CMS CAI/E4/19). Th e CMS schools also provided a foundation for an attitude of study, integration and separation that carried over to schools abroad, whether located in Freetown, London, Liverpool, Matanzas, Havana or Charleston. Among these venues, the Freetown connection was the closest and most available, and the creole identity emerging there, while separate and diff erent in origin from that occurring in the Pongo, further reinforced the transnational status of mixed-race children relative to children in the Pongo’s majority population. It also tied them more closely to mixed-race children in the diaspora. Peter Mark (1999), in his essay on the evolution of Luso-African identity, noted that cultural markers that produced a separate identity within charter generations eroded over time as succeeding generations intermarried with indigenous groups, indigenous peoples changed to meet challenges arriving from the Atlantic, and strangers lost physical traits that had separated them from the majority population. Th at certainly occurred, but unfortunately the surviving record of the charter generations in the Pongo tells us only about their most successful or noteworthy members, off ering almost nothing about those that lacked noto- riety. Nor does the record provide details about the impact of travel, education and broadening world view or ‘ethnic shifts’ (Keese 2010: 191) upon sons and daughters of African headmen who also attended schools and participated in the Atlantic Exchange. Th at impact was likely considerable, especially if they continued to intermarry with families descended from American and European traders. Data shows that indigenous leaders were able to shift ethnic identity depending upon circumstance by situationally using a language or dialect, a personal name, or a cultural pattern (‘badge’ or ‘label’) as a cultural marker to designate group membership (Moerman 1965; Mouser 2002). Fortunately, priests and teachers associated with the mission of the Spiritan (Holy Ghost) Fathers (Archives Générales du Congrégation du Saint-Esprit) in 30 Bruce L. Mouser the 1930s and 1940s kept records that contain elaborate genealogies of more than twenty infl uential families in the Pongo, nine of which were founded by slave traders who had arrived on the coast by the beginning of the nineteenth century.6 Th e mission’s records also provide details about educational opportunities made available to both headmen and traders during the French colonial period, which produced another ‘social space’ that further reduced diff erences between leadership groups within the Pongo. Unfortunately, no sophisticated attempt has been made to correlate genealogical data collected by the Spiritan Fathers and data found in letters and reports sent to London by CMS missionaries. Records are, however, suffi cient to confi rm that elite branches of trader families and those of river headmen intermarried, and that they continued to play prominent roles in Pongo commerce and society into the twenty-fi rst century. For example, Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo (Tchidimbo 1987: 22), Roman Catholic Archbishop of Conakry from 1961 to 1979 and a Spiritan Father who died on 15 August 2011, was able to trace his American ancestry through his mother, whom he identifi ed as a métis, to Benja- min Curtis, who arrived in the Pongo from Boston in 1794. Th rough the Curtis family, Tchidimbo also traced his descent to the Pongo’s royal Kati family, with which Curtis had intermarried. Using information from Tchidimbo’s autobiography, data from CMS records and reports found in the Archives Générales du Sénégal, Coifman (1994) produced an important but incomplete genealogy of Archbishop Tchidimbo that details the fusion of Curtis and Kati political interests in the Pongo and the critical role played by the Curtis family into the late twentieth century. In her concluding sentence, Coifman (1994: 289) noted that ‘when Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo returned home [from abroad] in 1952, he was met at Conakry by a tribe of kin and relations, Christian and Muslim, of Curtis, Katty, Turpin, Fernandez, Litburn [Lightbourn], Wilkinson and Tchi- dimbo’, with at least fi ve of those dating their origins to the eighteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the number of transnational families who counted their residences in the Rio Pongo as primary, and whose charter generations either maintained residences in America or sent their children to America or abroad for education, was signifi - cant. Two examples – the Holman and Fraser families – with primary branches in the Rio Pongo are used here to illustrate the transnational nature of these new families. Both were multi-sited, with links in Africa, America and England. Both engaged in the slave trade and operated plantations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Holman Family John Holman Sr. was from London, where his brothers were innkeepers and a pewterer but also investors in his African commerce.7 By 1768, Holman was already established in the Pongo and Dembia river trades, with commercial ties to Deﬁ ning Transnational as a Family Construct 31

London-based traders at Bance Island in Sierra Leone and to Liverpool interests at the nearby Îles de Los (Hancock 1995: 177–220). Holman also maintained close commercial ties with the most important slave merchants in Charleston, South Carolina (Koger 1995: 110–11). Holman had several wives in the Pongo, none of whom were identifi ed as free persons. His principal wife, Elizabeth, was listed in offi cial documents as a ‘slave’ who bore him at least fi ve children (John II, Samuel, Esther, Elizabeth and Margaret). By another wife he had sons Richard and William. Yet another wife bore him a son known in the Nunez trade as John Coleman. No other children or wives were reported in documents. John Sr. sent John II to study in Liverpool, but by 1785 John II, Samuel and their half-brother William were already operating trading enterprises of their own in the Rio Pongo. Holman remained active in the Rio Pongo until 1790, when he moved his wife Elizabeth, their children and their slaves to South Carolina. In 1783 an insurrection of slaves and subalterns had broken out in the state of Moria, less than a hundred kilometres south-east of the Pongo, encouraging slave rebellions throughout the region (Mouser 2007: 27–41). Holman, then the second wealth- iest trader in Pongo commerce, began to look abroad, where he might better protect his investments and his family, and in 1787 he travelled to Charleston, where he arranged to purchase Blessing Plantation (Koger 1995: 111). Th ree years later he left the Pongo with his family and slaves, and after a brief detour to Savannah, Georgia, he established his family at Blessing Plantation in 1791.8 Much is known about the Holman family, partly because inheritance problems after Holman’s death soon after his arrival in South Carolina produced records that contained particulars about the family’s investments in both Africa and America. British documents also detailed the family’s activities in the Rio Pongo. William Holman and his family had remained in the Pongo, taking possession of John Sr.’s interests at Bashia in the upper Pongo and continuing to ship slaves to the Charleston market in the following years (Corry 1807: 92; Knutsford 1900: 126; Afzelius 1967: 105–9). In his last will and testament, John Sr. freed his wife Elizabeth and assigned management of his property in South Carolina to his sons John II and Samuel. Within three generations, John Sr.’s descendants had become models of transnational families – and of the tensions that occurred within these families. John II, who had studied in Liverpool, moved his family and slaves to South Carolina in 1790. Following the death of his father in 1791, he purchased a plantation near Blessing Plantation where he used his and his father’s slaves, who would have comprised a large slave workforce numbering nearly a hundred. He also travelled often to the Pongo, as he still had economic interests in Africa and there were still enormous profi ts to be obtained in the slave trade. Eventually, having grown dissatisfi ed with his life in South Carolina and the type of hybrid, segregated African American society that had developed there, he returned to the 32 Bruce L. Mouser

Rio Pongo, though he meanwhile continued to operate a plantation in South Carolina under the management of his brother Samuel. Koger (1995: 116–17) described John II as ‘probably the fi rst and only African-born entrepreneur who resided in Africa as an absentee planter in the New World’. He married a ‘mulatto’ woman from ‘America’ who bore him at least four children (Margaret, Betsy, Elizabeth and John III). All his children attended CMS schools established in the Rio Pongo between 1808 and 1817. His brother Samuel remained in South Carolina and married a ‘free person of colour’ from Charleston. Both Elizabeth and Margaret married Collins brothers, described as ‘persons of colour’ and owners of rice growing plantations. Esther also remained in South Carolina and married James Anderson, whose uncle, Richard Oswald, had operated factories in the Rio Pongo in the mid-eighteenth century (Koger 2006: 119–24).9 Essentially the American branch assumed characteristics that were American and married within the Euro-African group, although the latter was located in South Carolina rather than in the Pongo. Th e African branch of the family, or at least the one descended from John II, identifi ed itself as more African than the branch located in South Carolina, likely a response to the types of creolization that had occurred in both places. John II was particularly disappointed that Samuel and his sisters had devoted little attention to his property in South Carolina, which he lost through their mismanagement. In 1816 his daughter Margaret married Jellorum Harrison, who had lived in Scotland and Central Asia and visited America (Hair 1962: 45–47). Harrison later served as a catechist at Bashia School, where Margaret was a student. Harrison’s uncle was William Fernandez, headman at Bouramaya, who had studied in Liverpool in his youth (CMS CAI/E5/18 and CAI/E4/100). Harrison also was a cousin to John Ormond Jr. (a trader at Bangalan who travelled often to Havana), to Elizabeth Lightbourn (a trader at Farenya whose husband’s brother was a lawyer in Charles- ton) and to Richard Wilkinson of Fallangia on the Little Pongo. Wilkinson, who had studied as a catechist in London in 1815 and 1816, spoke Baga, Susu, Fula, English and a bit of Portuguese. In 1821, Wilkinson sailed to Baltimore, Mary- land, to purchase trade goods for the Pongo market and, while there, became an offi cial interpreter for the U.S. government in a case involving slaves who had ac- cidentally illegally entered the United States as crewmen on board a trading vessel (Mouser 2000). Margaret’s sister Betsy married William Lawrence, who was fl uent in English, Portuguese, Baga, Susu and Fula, and who was well enough respected in Freetown to purchase property there in the late 1820s. Both sisters’ marriages were performed as church ceremonies, but Betsy and William Lawrence were also wedded in the ‘country fashion’, indicating a fusion of European and African customs. Like his father, John III studied in Liverpool. Interestingly, the Holman name largely disappeared in South Carolina, where it was subsumed into the Collins and Anderson families. Still, Koger (1995: 127) was able to write in 1995 that ‘the colored rice planters of Charleston and Defi ning Transnational as a Family Construct 33

Georgetown counties can be traced to the Holman family’. Th e Holman name is also rare in later Pongo history, whereas the names Lawrence, Wilkinson and Harrison featured prominently into the twentieth century.

Fraser Family John Fraser, born in Scotland in 1769, entered Pongo commerce as a slave trader before 1799, lived in the river region until 1807 and remained active there until his death in 1813. He married Phenda, the widow of a prominent British trader who had operated a successful Liverpool-linked factory at the Îles de Los. Fraser established his principal centres of commerce in the Pongo at Bangara, Bashia and Bangalan (Valley Sunday Star-Monitor-Herald [Brownsville, Texas], 9, 16 and 23 January 1938). Between 1799 and 1807, he and Phenda, described in marriage documents as a free person and no doubt the heir to her previous husband’s investments in the river trade, had fi ve children. When South Carolina reopened the slave trade in 1803, Fraser expanded his commercial enterprise by establishing an offi ce in Charleston, moving there along with a large number of people from the Pongo. He left Phenda and his three youngest children at Bashia, where the children would attend school and Phenda would manage his and her considerable economic interests (CMS CAI/E4/19; Schafer 1999: 1–2). By 1812, Phenda had moved the centre of her operations in the Pongo to the Bangalan branch of the river. Son James was sent to Charleston and enrolled in school there (Koger 2006). Daughter Margaret was taken to Liverpool at age four to live with Th omas Powell, who maintained additional residences in Charleston and the Îles de Los (Schafer 1999: 4). When the slave trade became illegal for British and American citizens in 1808, Fraser moved his Charleston-based operations to East Florida, which was then still a Spanish colony. He died there in 1813 in a shipwreck. His holdings in the Pongo, until the time of his death, were administered by his wife Phenda and by Zebulon Miller, George Cooke, Samuel Gale (all Americans) and Samuel Samo (a Dutch subject). Fraser’s holdings and his last will and testament reveal much about the operation of this family. Th e value of his Florida plantations alone stood at USD 56,744 in 1813 (USD 780,000 at 2010 purchasing power). In a lawsuit against the British government for damages to his property caused by a British squadron raid directed against American traders in the Bangalan branch of the Pongo in 1812, Fraser claimed that the British, assuming he was an American citizen, had destroyed property worth USD 40,000. His daughters Mary Ann, Eleanor and Elizabeth, who in 1813 were students at the CMS school at Bashia, were subsequently sent to England and France for training (Valley Sunday Star-Monitor- Herald, 9, 16 and 23 January 1938; Schafer 1999: 4–6). According to Fraser’s will, his children would inherit only upon reaching the age of twenty-one. Th at Fraser freed Phenda (who was already free) in his will 34 Bruce L. Mouser also complicated the distribution of his property, for persons identifi ed as slave in Spanish Florida could not be freed in a will or inherit property. Executors paid the educational expenses of Fraser’s children in Europe, but legal challenges and court and legal costs attached to administration of his estate multiplied (Schafer 1999: 6). Elizabeth and Mary Ann, who by 1826 had returned to the Pongo and married William Skelton Jr. and Th omas Gaff ery Curtis of Kissing, appointed their husbands to negotiate distribution of their inheritances. Th eir husbands turned for assistance to Styles Lightbourn in the upper Pongo, whose brother was a Charleston attorney. Th e fi nal settlement was not reached for yet another quarter century, when Elizabeth (now the only living heir) received USD 33,000 (USD 955,000 in 2009 dollars) (Schafer 1999: 3). In 1851, Elizabeth and her husband were then principal traders at Victoria, located in the lower Nunez River (Coifman 2000: 501–2).

Conclusions A study of these two families suggests that several constructs had developed within the fi rst, founding generations. In each case, the founder came to the coast as a stranger without a lineage to provide protection to himself or the wife he acquired when he settled there. Th e common cultural marker was the marriage of a lineage-less stranger to a local woman who was either a free person or a person of slave background. Th e kinship model – that of the dominant Susu group – was patrilineal and patrilocal. In this arrangement, widowed or abandoned wives could appeal only to their father’s family for support, though widows also had the option of marrying another stranger (Butscher 2000 [1815]: 10). A widow might otherwise obtain ‘Big Man’ status either through her children or through property or the control of property she or her children may have inherited. But there also was a construct that was new, at least to a degree. Marriage alliances were common, whether involving indigenous unions or only strangers. Characteristics among the charter generations of strangers (‘mulatto’ features, Western dress, religious observance, language use, fi rst names and surnames, education, occupation, travel, location, mobility), however, were commonly held attributes that stigmatized and marginalized them, and also encouraged family alliances among elite branches and development of a self-identifi ed hybrid culture, similar to the ‘creolization’ described by Knörr (2010: 733). Th e most successful and best travelled branches of these families intermarried prodigiously and produced an expatriate/hybrid community that, to a degree, was outside the bounds of uncle/nephew obligations. Th is community enjoyed liberties and opportunities that others more closely tied to traditional patterns did not have. Its members needed to follow some rules to remain infl uential and protected within the Rio Pongo context, as the dominant indigenous group recognized and stigmatized them as persons having less Defi ning Transnational as a Family Construct 35 desirable characteristics and separate origins with their own customs and rules. Th e stigma attached to these families, however, was diff erent from that attached to the creole community of Sierra Leone. All Pongo-based families mentioned in this study trace their origins to the slave trade and to landlord/stranger relationships that involved wifegiving and wifetaking. Th ese examples suggest that accommodation and acculturation did occur, but only to a degree in the early generations. Th at changed signifi cantly once the ‘social space’ changed during the French period that began in the 1850s. Th e basic notion of patrilineal descent was like that practised in the West, except that the wife lost claims upon her father’s lineage. What mattered most was ‘free’ status, which defi ned who could inherit and claim authority within an extended family. Sir George Collier suggested in 1820 that large family size guaranteed respect for the customs of the country. Th at may indeed have occurred, but our knowledge of the size of a family is limited to records kept by its elite members who found it worthwhile to do so, or to outside resources that identify certain persons meriting inclusion in reports. Th e emergence of large families – especially those connected through marriage alliances – and of the mobility and transnational connections evidenced in the charter generations of the Holman and Fraser families, reduced their compliance with customs that challenged their own economic and social interests. Meanwhile, with the passage of time and intermarriage outside the trader alliances, especially during the French period, their ties to local kinship groups and to obligations linked to traditional uncle/nephew relationships increased rather than decreased, as was so for the Curtis family of Archbishop Tchidimbo. Th eir mobility and access to wealth, education and colonial authorities who established agencies on the river further strengthened their own infl uence relative to traditional authority and custom.

Bruce L. Mouser, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wiscon- sin-La Crosse, is author of American Colony on the Rio Pongo: Th e War of 1812, Continuing Slave Trade, and Plans for a Settlement of African Americans, 1810- 1830 (Africa World Press, 2014) and numerous items in the Papers on Africa Series of the University of Leipzig and occasional papers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published widely on the slave trade and on trading families of coastal Guinea.

Notes 1. Th e Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was the original name of the Royal African Company. 2. ‘Second Annual Report upon the Settlements on the Coast of Africa, by Commodore Sir G.R. Collier, 16th September 1820’ (Foreign Oﬃ ce 1830: 8:847–48). Surnames of 36 Bruce L. Mouser

traders in the Pongo before 1840 include: Andrews, Anthony, Bearing, Botefere, Brodie, Brody, Dunbar, Bull, Carr, Cockelshell, Coffi n, Cook, Cooke, Cooper, Conneau, Cum- mings, Curtis, Dickson, Dunbar, East, Ellis, Faber, Fist, Fraser, Gaff rey, Gale, Gardner, Garrett, Gilton, Gomez, Gray, Grey, Griggs, Harrison, Hickson, Holman, Irving, Irwin, Jeff rys, Johnson, Josiff e, Lancaster, Lawrence, Lightbourn, Lorial, Maguire, Miller, Mis- gan, Nelson, Nevel, Ormond, Pearce, Pendleton, Perry, Peters, Quail, Rhodes, Richards, Richardson, Samo, Skelton, Sparratt, Spearce, Sterne, Talboard, Tavel, Th omas, Tilling- hast, Tool, Tryon, Varing, Welsh, White, Wilkinson, Wilson, Wood. 3. R. Lerouge, ‘Quand la Guinée s’appelait “Rivières du Sud” (Miettes d’histoire),’ Archive Générales Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, Boite 269, A-I, page 28. Th is is an unpublished typescript. Lerouge had few kind words for the founders of families, describing them as arrived ‘as poor as Job’ (32). He also described the fi rst generation of métis children as ‘the fi rst degeneration’ (32). 4. Quoted in Great Britain, Privy Council, ‘Report of the Lords of the Committee of Coun- cil…relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations, 1789’ (enclosed letter, John Matthews, James Penny and Robert Norris to John Tarleton, 16 April 1788). 5. Caulker, Cummings, Curtis, Jeff rys, Lancaster, Lawrence, Quail, Rhode, Wilkinson, An- thony, Botefere, Cockleshell, Fraser, Garrett, Gilton, Hickson and Peters. 6. I am greatly indebted to V.B. Coifman (University of Minnesota), G.E. Brooks (Indiana University) and R. Sarrò Maluquer (Oxford University), who made their photocopies of genealogical material from the Archives Générales, Congregation du Saint-Esprit, Chevilly-Larue, available for this research. 7. I am indebted to R. Chaney of Lyndonville, New York, for crucial information about the Holman family. His wife is a descendant of John Holman through the Collins family of South Carolina. Chaney relished the process of discovery, and we communicated often about his fi ndings. He was an enthusiastic researcher but a reluctant writer. In 2008, I asked his permission to use his fi ndings for a summary of Holman activities in the United States, and Chaney supplied me with several documents that he considered most helpful. We were at that stage of collaboration when I learned of his death in 2009. His papers relating to the Holman family were not kept following his death. 8. Petition of John Holman to the Speaker and Members of the South Carolina House of Representatives, 13 January 1791, Records of the General Assembly, #123, South Caro- lina Department of Archives and History. 9. Th ere is some disagreement whether this James Anderson was the same as the person identifi ed by Koger.

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Harrell-Bond, B., and U. Rijnsdorp. 1976. ‘Th e Emergence of the “Stranger-Permit Marriage” and other Forms of Conjugal Union in Rural Sierra Leone’, Africana Research Bulletin 6(4): 6–43. Johnson, A.G. 2005. Privilege, Power, and Diff erence. Boston: McGraw Hill. Keese, A. 2010. ‘Who’s King Tom? Being a “Temne”, “Mandinka” or “Susu” between Identity, Solidarity and Ethnic Shifts in Early Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone’, in A. Keese (ed.), Ethnicity and the Long-Term Perspective. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 191–215. Kennedy-Hafl ett, C. 1996. ‘“Moral Marriage”: A Mixed-Race Relationship in Nineteenth- Century Charleston, South Carolina’, Th e South Carolina Historical Magazine 97(3): 206–26. Kivel, P. 2002. Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice. Philadephia: New Society Publishers. Knörr, J. 2010. ‘Contemporary Creoleness; or, Th e World in Pidginization?’, Current Anthro- pology 51(6): 731–59. Knutsford, V. 1900. Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay. London: Edward Arnold. Koger, L. 1995. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ———. 2006. ‘Black Masters: Th e Misunderstood Slaveowners’, Southern Quarterly 43(2): 52–73. Levine, D.N. 1979. ‘Simmel at a Distance: On the History of Systematics of the Sociology of the Stranger’, in W.A. Shack (ed.), Strangers in African Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 21–36. Mark, P. 1999. ‘Th e Evolution of “Portuguese” Identity: Luso-Africans of the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History 40(2): 173–91. McLachlan, P. 1999. Travels into the Baga and Soosoo Countries in 1821, edited by B.L. Mouser and R. Sarró. University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, History and Culture Series, no. 2. Meneses, E.H. 1987. ‘Traders and Marginality in a Complex Social System’, Ethnology 26: 231–44. Moerman, M. 1965. ‘Ethnic Identifi cation in a Complex Civilization: Who Are the Lue?’ American Anthropologist 67(5): 1215–30. Montgomery, W.M. 2007. ‘Pineville’s Free Lady of Color’, Th e Columbia Star, 27 July 2007. Mouser, B.L. 1975. ‘Landlords-Strangers: A Process of Accommodation and Assimilation’, Th e International Journal of African Historical Studies 8: 425–40. ———. 1996. ‘Iles de Los as Bulking Center in the Slave Trade, 1750–1800’, Revue Française d’histoire d’outre-mer 83(313): 77–90. ———. 2000. ‘Th e Baltimore/Pongo Connection: American Entrepreneurism, Colonial Expansionism, or African Opportunism?’ Th e International Journal of African Historical Studies 33(2): 313–33. ———. 2002. ‘Who and Where Were the Baga? European Perspectives from 1793 to 1821’, History in Africa 29: 337–64. ———. 2004. ‘African Academy: Clapham 1799–1806’, History of Education 33(1): 87–103. ———. 2007. ‘Rebellion, Marronage and Jihad’, Journal of African History 48: 27–44. ———. 2009. ‘Origins of Church Missionary Society Accommodation to Imperial Policy: Th e Sierra Leone Quagmire and the Closing of the Susu Mission, 1804–17’, Journal of Religion in Africa 39(4): 1–28. Mouser, B.L., and N.F. Mouser. 2003. Case of the Reverend Peter Hartwig, Slave Trader or Mis- understood Idealist? Clash of Church Missionary Society/Imperial Objectives in Sierra Leone, 1804–1815. Madison: African Studies Publications. Defi ning Transnational as a Family Construct 39

O’Beirne, B. 1979. ‘Brian O’Beirne Journal, January to April 1821’, in B.L. Mouser (ed.), Guinea Journals: Journeys into Guinea-Conakry During the Sierra Leone Phase, 1800–1821. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, pp. 137–280. Ong, A. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: Th e Cultural Logics of Transnationalism.Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sarró, R. 2009. Th e Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schafer, D. 1999. ‘Family Ties that Bind: Anglo-African Slave Traders in Africa and Florida, John Fraser and His Descendants’, Slavery and Abolition 20(3): 1–21. Tchidimbo, R. 1987. Noviciat d’un Évêque: Huit ans et huit mois de captivité sous Sékou Touré. Paris: Fayard. Th ayer, J.S. 1978. ‘Some Remarks on Informal Social Networks Among the Soso of Sierra Leone’, Africana Research Bulletin 9(1–2): 44–66. ———. 1979. ‘Varieties of Religion and Religious Specialists Among the Susu of Sierra Le- one’, unpublished paper. ———. 1981a. ‘Religion and Social Organization Among a West African Muslim People: Th e Susu of Sierra Leone’, Ph.D. thesis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. ———. 1981b. ‘Th e Persistence of Slavery on the Guinea Coast’, unpublished paper. ———. 1983. ‘Nature, Culture, and the Supernatural Among the Susu’, American Ethnologist, 10(1): 116–32. Chapter 2 Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared Th e Cases of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka Christoph Kohl

Introduction Th e Upper Guinea Coast is a special case, where processes of creolization in connection to Portugal’s expansion are concerned. Colonial ideology used to depict Guinea-Bissau as the ‘fi rst Portuguese possession’, ‘cradle’ (Reis Torgal 2005: 64), and ‘dawn’ (Governo da Guiné 1952) of the Portuguese empire. Th e Portuguese called at the Upper Guinea Coast on their way to Asia and Brazil. Portuguese culture, having ‘disembarked’ there fi rst, has been appropriated, integrated and transformed by local populations there since the late fi fteenth century. Hence, the Upper Guinea Coast was the fi rst region where creolization occurred in connection to (Portuguese) colonialism (Vale de Almeida 2007). Processes of cultural and particularly linguistic creolization in Africa and Asia have been the subject of several ‘mono-sited’ studies. However, very few (e.g. Knörr 2008, 2010) involve a comparative look at such processes and their social impact. Generally speaking, fi ndings concerning linguistic connections are linked to connections beyond language – where people speak, they interact (and vice versa); and where they interact, new culture and new identifi cations are likely to emerge. Research has, however, led to a number of studies on creole groups and culture, which I term ‘Luso-Creole’. Th is notion alludes to a network of ‘continued identities’ and cultural representations that started emerging during the Portuguese expansion that began in the fi fteenth century and have since acquired specifi c complexities and dynamics (Pina Cabral 2010). Historical links between the Luso-Creole language varieties in Guinea-Bissau, the Casamance and Cape Verde, and between Upper Guinea, the Gulf of Guinea islands and the Caribbean (Martinus 1996; Jacobs 2009) are not disputed, but early connections between the Upper Guinea Coast and Asia (cf. Kohl 2011c; cf. Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 41

Cardoso 2010) are somewhat more controversial. According to the monogenetic hypothesis – based on historico-linguistic data put forward by Th omp son (1961a, 1961b) and Valkhoff (1966, 1972) but contested by authors like Ferraz (1987), amongst others – a Luso-Creole language served as the fi rst global lingua franca, connecting the Indian Ocean basin with Africa. Hancock (1975) claimed that Asian Luso-Creole languages generally seem to be marginally connected to the Upper Guinea Coast. Cardoso (2010) recently suggested that ships’ passengers journeying from Africa to Asia may have acted as transmitters of Luso-Pidgin elements, leaving unmentioned the possibility that Africans who (were) settled in parts of Asia may have contributed to the spread of Luso-Creole languages there. Against this background, this chapter sets out to compare some of the dynamics at play in processes of cultural creolization – namely, creole identity construction, creole boundary maintenance and creole infl uences on postcolonial nation-building – in Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka. In doing so, it aims to disclose similarities and diff erences of the processes and results of creolization, and explain how these resemblances and diff erences are related to the social make-up of the respective societies in which they occur.1

Lusocreolization in Cross-Cultural Research Th e carrying out of a comparative survey has to rely substantially on existing scholarly literature, not just because no researcher alone can study all the diff erent creole groups to be examined, but also because comparisons may well profi t from a historical perspective based on historical sources. Meanwhile, cross-cultural analyses may have to rely on fairly diverse, disparate ethnographic data from the respective geographic settings, which complicates comparisons – as is the case with this study. If we choose to look at (Luso-)Creole culture and identity in a comparative, cross-cultural perspective, then we need to conceptualize ‘creole’ as an analytical term, since attributes like ‘creole’ and its cognates in other European languages (‘créole’, ‘crioulo’, ‘criollo’, etc.) ‘have meant lots of diff erent things at diff erent times’ (Stewart 2007: 5). Th e creole case is further complicated by the fact that some creole groups are – by reason of their heterogeneous origins within colonial contexts – identifi ed as ‘creoles’ by third parties yet do not employ the adjective ‘creole’ (or its counterpart in any other language) as part of their ethnonym or self-description. Th is applies, for example, to the Kristons de Geba in Guinea-Bissau (Kohl 2009a, 2009b) as well as the Portuguese Burghers and so-called Kaffi rs in Sri Lanka – cases to be studied in this chapter. Furthermore, a creole language does not necessarily exist in all locations where creole groups live, as shown by the examples of the Agudás and Tabom in Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria, who, although they do not speak a creole language, are nevertheless regarded as creoles by historians and social anthropologists. Th e fact that analytical and actor perspectives on 42 Christoph Kohl

‘creoleness’ can diff er (Knörr 2010) is thus important for comparisons. In Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, moreover, creole languages initially spoken mainly by members of small creole groups spread across ethnic boundaries and turned into major lingua francas. As a result, a small number of ‘creoles’ serve a large number of creole speakers. How, then, can diff erent meanings of ‘creole’ and ‘creolization’ be conceived in ways that make them appropriate tools for cross-cultural research? ‘Creoliza- tion’ in an anthropological sense may be conceived as an intergenerational process in which old group boundaries are increasingly dissolved and replaced by new ones. Th is process is accompanied by the recontextualization of both identity and culture (Knörr 2010) and may result in strongly or weakly ethnicized new identities (cf. Kohl 2009b). Creolization is thus linked to indigenization, in that a newly emerging creole group increasingly identifi es with its new local, cultural and social environment and refers to the latter and to a specifi c shared history as markers of group identity (Knörr 2010). At this juncture, new settlers can become ‘fi rstcomers’ to certain localities, as opposed to the ‘latecomers’ who follow thereafter (Kopytoff 1987). In several cases, creole groups have surrounded themselves with a mystique of exclusiveness (Cohen 1981; Roberts, Re- heem and Colin-Th omé 1989), portraying themselves as ‘bringers of civilization’ and thereby distancing themselves from the autochthonous, ‘noncivilized’ population. Historical processes of creolization often occurred in societies that were shaped by rather fi xed boundaries along social, physical and ancestral criteria, constraining socially upward and downward mobility (Knörr 2010). However, creole identity is not a priori linked to phenotypical and class-related characteristics (notably elite status; see Knörr 2010), and its emergence is not restricted to locations that were subject to European colonization. Rather, creolization occurs in settings marked by cultural and identitarian heterogeneity and social hierarchies. Th erefore, creolization can also occur in settings untouched by European colonialism, such as (precolonial) East Africa (e.g. Walker 2005; Bryceson 2010), where a distinct Swahili identity emerged in some coastal settings. Cultural creolization is not to be equated with processes of urbanization or ‘detribalization’. Indeed, it has often occurred in rural settings like the plantation societies of the Caribbean. Likewise, urbanization may entail indigenization but does not necessarily involve creolization. Detribalization – a term often used to denote processes in which people become estranged from their ‘traditional’ culture upon coming into contact with ‘modern’ ways of life, often in multiethnic and urban settings – however, constitutes one aspect of cultural creolization in that the forging of a new common identity among people of various origins necessitates the de-ethnicization of the diff erent original identities in support of the newly emerging common identity (Knörr 2010). Processes of cultural creolization are distinct from processes of cultural transethnicization (which Knörr [2010] termed ‘pidginization’): although in both cases a new common identity Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 43 evolves, in the course of transethnicization the heterogeneous original identities stay intact and are not substituted by the newly emerging identity. What might comparative analyses of Luso-Creole culture and identity look like, and how can ‘Luso-Creole’ be conceptualized? Here, Luso-Creole refers to a ‘travel of ideas’ (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Kaufmann and Rottenburg 2012), alluding to long-term impacts of Portugal’s maritime interactions and interchanges that continue to unfold their potentials to the present day, as evidenced by now-current narratives, cultural representations and identity constructions that ex post refer to past times of Portuguese colonization. In fact, many Luso-Creole communities continue to refer to Portuguese legacies, such as the Catholic faith and Luso-Creole languages, that are often employed as ethnic markers. However, these markers are insuffi cient to defi ne a ‘Luso-Creole’ (Pina Cabral 2010), or to delineate a ‘Portuguese’ space, as proponents of ‘lusotropicalism’ have suggested. Lusotropicalism was Portugal’s colonial ideology before 1974. Taking a Eurocentric and essentialist perspective, this ideology attributed to the Portuguese the exceptional ability to acclimatize to the tropics and socioculturally fraternize with the colonized people, thus attempting to underline the Iberian country’s greatness and peculiarity (Castelo 1999). Th e doctrine therefore implied that a number of groups colonized or infl uenced by Portugal since the fi fteenth century shared a Portuguese cultural ‘essence’ that suggested a specifi c cultural reciprocity with Portugal yet never existed in social practice. Analytically, Luso-Creole markers are not fi xed cultural essences. Rather, they are subject to continuous reinterpretations, recontextualizations and even reifi cations that serve to maintain and redraw cultural and identitarian boundaries vis- à-vis other groups. During Portugal’s colonial expansion, the encounter between Eurocentric ideas and diverse, locally specifi c thought-worlds led to the un- planned translation of ideas, turning them into diff erent substances (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996). In the long run, sociocultural values, norms and features were often selectively appropriated by emerging Luso-Creole groups – both inten- tionally and unintentionally – that subsequently integrated and adjusted them to their own needs and cultural structures: ‘those social innovations that were in- compatible with local social structures were rejected, but useful or unthreatening characteristics were embraced, particularly if such moves were likely to be seen as positive attributes’ (Walker 2005: 195). A Luso-Creole ‘travel of ideas’ can attest to the power of the colonized subjects who, as agents, creatively and selectively appropriated specifi c ‘Portuguese’ sociocultural values and representations, combining them with their own ideas or those borrowed from third parties, and thereby underscoring intercultural interactions of various kinds. Th us, the imitation and appropriation of ideas was by no means unilateral (as lusotropicalism suggested); rather, the ‘travel of ideas’ has always gone back and forth. Europe in general, like Portugal in particular, has proved to be only one disseminator of ideas, albeit quite a powerful one. Once 44 Christoph Kohl appropriated, ideas of heterogeneous origins were integrated, intermingled and transformed over generations, sometimes to such an extent that their origins are no longer traceable. Nevertheless, in various geographic settings references to Portugal can be quite strong, serving as markers of diff erence in mutual boundary construction. In African, American and Asian creole contexts, ‘Portuguese’ may often be interpreted diff erently from European understandings of the term. Furthermore, many who refer to ‘Portuguese’ or Christian-Catholic features may not at all identify themselves as ‘Portuguese’. References to ‘Portuguese’ change over time and are always related to context and place (cf. Fabian 1983). A Luso- Creole space can be conceived as an intersubjective network of contacts that owes its existence to distinct markers – sociocultural concepts, styles, ideas, features, patterns of cognition – that in various localities have passed through manifold complex and creative dynamics (Pina Cabral 2010). In the following discussion of Luso-Creole culture and identity I will con- centrate on two objects of comparison. Using my fi ndings from Guinea-Bissau and data extracted from scholarly literature on Sri Lanka, I will address (1) the construction of creole identities and the strategies employed to maintain boundaries in the interaction with other, non-creole groups; and (2) creole groups’ contributions to postcolonial nation-building, both top-down and from below. Given the dissimilarity and incompleteness of data, this can only be done in a preliminary fashion at this point.

Guinea-Bissau versus Sri Lanka In the second half of the ﬁ fteenth century, the Portuguese started establishing trading posts along the West African coast. Th ere, Europeans, Cape Verdeans and Africans came to interact and intermingle, increasingly developing distinct identities and lifestyles that exist up to the present day. Guinea-Bissau remained a Portuguese colony until 1973/74, when it achieved independence after more than a decade of armed struggle. Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, was ‘discovered’ by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. Portugal had to cede this territory to the Netherlands in 1658, and the Dutch were themselves supplanted by the British in 1796. In any case, one result of Portugal’s presence was the emergence of small Luso-Creole communities along the island’s east coast and in its north-west. Sri Lanka became independent from British rule in 1948.

Identity Construction and Interethnic Relations In Guinea-Bissau, various creole categories of people have long coexisted. Th ese include descendants of immigrants from Cape Verde, who can be distinguished from people of Kriston (literally ‘Christian’) origin (cf. Havik 2004, 2007; Kohl 2009a, 2009b). Creoles number only a few thousand people. Th e early emer- Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 45 gence of Kriston identity is strongly connected with the European-African colonial encounter along the Upper Guinea Coast, as numerous scholars have shown (e.g. Mark 2002; Brooks 2003; Havik 2004; Mark and da Silva Horta 2011). Portuguese navigators began exploring the coastal and riverine regions of present- day Guinea-Bissau in the mid-fi fteenth century. Subsequently, European adventurers, delinquents and merchants settled in the area and began to work as commercial middlemen between Africans in the hinterland and European and Cape Verdean businessmen. Th is turned praças – small, isolated Portuguese trading posts connected by maritime links – into exchange hubs for commodities and slaves that served as locations for European-African cultural encounters. Apart from the Portuguese offi cials and militaries, Catholic clergymen established themselves in the trading posts with a view to proselytize Africans. Within these praças, high levels of interethnic mixture and intermarriages (i.e. a process of cultural creolization) produced new cultural representations and a new common creole identity. Identity among the Kriston communities was ultimately defi ned by language (a Portuguese-based creole vernacular, nowadays known as Kriol), a distinctive architecture (rectangular houses with verandas) and the Catholic religion (Mark 2002). For instance, manjuandadis – predominantly female associations that provide for sociability and mutual solidarity (Trajano Filho 1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2010; cf. Kohl 2009b, 2012a, 2012b) – have apparently integrated features of both European Christian lay brotherhoods and African age-set organizations (see below). Likewise integrating Portuguese and African features is carnival, which used to be celebrated annually in the former trade settlements (Kohl 2009b). Th e Kristons, who served as economic, cultural and political brokers for Europeans engaged in commerce, regarded themselves as fi rstcomers to these trading posts and are widely recognized as such. In the early days, several terms to denote Kristons emerged, some of them persisting until at least the early twentieth century. In use for a long time was the term grumete (literally, ‘cabin boy’), implying a relation of servitude, whereas tangomão – referring to outcasts and renegades involved in riverine trade – had largely disappeared by the late nineteenth century (Havik 2004). Other widely used terms ascribed to Kristons were fi lhos da terra (literally, ‘sons of the land’) and cristãos da terra or ‘Christians of the land’ (Mark 2002). Historically, Kristons also identifi ed themselves also as ‘Portuguese’, as they connoted their Catholic faith and fl uency in Portuguese or Kriol respectively with ‘Portugueseness’. One strategy Kristons use even nowadays to emphasize their creole descent is toponymical references, by which they associate themselves with one of the former trading posts to indicate their origin, for example by adding di Bissau (‘from Bissau’) or di Cacheu (‘from Cacheu’). Th us, although Christianity at present is no longer the preserve of creoles, the additive Kriston di Bolama (‘Christian of Bolama’) highlights the individual’s or family’s creole background in one or several of the former praças. 46 Christoph Kohl

Kriston identity has been transethnic: Kristons have identifi ed with one or another ethnic group inasmuch as Kriston identity served as an additional or umbrella identifi cation for members of other ethnic groups. My recent fi eld research found that creole members of the middle and lower classes who identifi ed with one of the various ‘ordinary’ ethnic groups inhabiting Guinea-Bissau (notably Pepels, Manjacos, Balantas, Bijagós, Felupes or Mancanhas) simultaneously identifi ed themselves as Kristons or used such expressions as di Cacheu or Kris- ton di Farim, mentioned above. By contrast, members of the upper class often tended to negate any ethnic affi liation, thus continuing the colonial practice of negating ethnic affi liation while stressing nationality (formerly ‘Portuguese’, at present ‘Bissau-Guinean’). Nonetheless, fellow citizens (pretend to) know these individuals’ or families’ ethnic background. Th e identity of those Kristons who mixed with Cape Verdeans, Europeans and – since the early twentieth century – newly arrived Lebanese is only weakly ethnicized. Th e Kristons may be described as a category of people rather than a group with a pronounced ‘we-consciousness’ or ‘groupness’ (cf. Brubaker 2004) – in contrast to both Bissau-Guinean Cape Verdeans and Kristons de Geba. Scholars sometimes ignore Kriston identity, considering only Cape Verdean descendants residing in Guinea-Bissau to be creoles (see Schiefer 2002; Ellery Mourão 2009). Historically, Cape Verdeans’ identity indeed evolved through a process of cultural creolization in the archipelago off the West African coast. Th ey have settled in Guinea-Bissau for centuries. Whereas members of recently migrated families often keep in touch with their families in the archipelago, other individuals in Cape Verdean families that have resided in the country for generations no longer maintain any familial ties to the islands (Kohl 2009a, forthcoming). Cape Verdean immigration to continental West Africa dates back to the early times of Portugal’s presence. Cape Verdean clergymen, traders, soldiers and, in the twentieth century, administrative staff and commercial clerks came to Guinea-Bissau. Th ey often used to intermingle especially with Kristons, but since the late nineteenth century Cape Verdeans have increasingly put emphasis on their distinctiveness (Havik 2004). To this day, many creoles of Cape Verdean descent claim to be more Portuguese, more European and hence more civilized than other inhabitants of Guinea-Bissau, including Kriston descendants, proudly depicting their ‘home country’ as closer to Europe in terms of sociocultural and economic indicators as well as political stability. To support their claims, some interviewees in Bissau, for example, referred to the Cape Verdean fl ag, which slightly resembles that of the European Union. To give another example, some of my neighbours of Cape Verdean origin in Guinea-Bissau accused their fellow Bissau-Guineans of being involved in magic and witchcraft, distancing themselves from such practices. However, in numerous informal conversations I found out that many of them themselves engaged in ‘superstitious’ beliefs and practices Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 47 that they publicly rejected. Politically, the Portuguese historically sought to portray Cape Verdeans as their allies, trying to divide the independence movement that engaged many Cape Verdeans. After independence, Cape Verdean politicians were criticized for their strong role in Bissau-Guinean politics, leading to the fi rst successful coup in 1980 (Kohl forthcoming). As in the Cape Verdean case, the identity of the Kristons de Geba is strongly ethnicized – the ethnonym refers to the now decayed former trading post of Geba in central Guinea-Bissau. Th e Kristons de Geba regard Geba as their ancestral home, although most of them now reside either in nearby Bafatá or in Bissau. Having traditionally settled in an area populated predominantly by Muslims, they developed a quite strong, non-transethnic ethnic identity, stressing their nominal Christian faith. Unlike other Kristons’ identifi cation, their ethnic ascription and self-identifi cation are congruent, and their group cohesion is very pronounced (see Kohl 2009a, 2011a). Despite these diff erences, many creoles in Guinea-Bissau continue to stress their historical roles as brokers for the Portuguese, emphasizing their part-Euro- pean genealogies, urban residence and Christian beliefs and often, in doing so, drawing a boundary between them and the ‘uncivilized’ (religiously and socially) rural population (Kohl 2009b). Kristons and Cape Verdeans are united by their common fl uency in the Luso-Creole Kriol language that emerged along the Up- per Guinea Coast in the sixteenth century and has turned into the country’s lingua franca in the past forty years (do Couto 1994).2 Th e example of Sri Lanka resembles the Bissau-Guinean case insofar as Sri Lanka is inhabited by various creole groups that refer to diff erent European her- itages. Today, they account for less than 1 per cent of the total population and live predominantly in urban environments along the coast. Th eir origins can be traced back to the times of colonization by the Portuguese, Dutch and British, whose consecutive presence entailed settlement by Europeans, Africans and In- dians and, henceforth, the emergence of several coexisting creole communities. Th e Dutch Burghers were a small but infl uential minority before losing ground to Sinhalese and Tamils after independence in 1948 (cf. McGilvray 1982; Henry 1986; Roberts, Reheem and Colin-Th omé 1989; Roberts 1994). eyTh pointed extensively to their part-Dutch ancestry and bear mention here only so far as their case facilitates the understanding of the relationship between creoles on the one hand and colonialism and nationalism on the other. My main focus will instead be the Portuguese Burghers (McGilvray 1982, 2007, 2008; Jackson 1990) and the so-called Kaffi rs (Jackson 1990; de Silva Jayasuriya 2001, 2003, 2006), as these groups refer to a Luso-Creole space, conceiving of themselves as parts of an intersubjective network. Th is Luso-Creole space is based on what these groups perceive, style, reinterpret, recontextualize and reify – both consciously and unconsciously – as ‘Portuguese’, putting forward their Catholic faith, a Luso- 48 Christoph Kohl

Creole language, a music style known as Baila (derived from the Portuguese term for ‘dance’) and Luso-Creole folk songs and narrations (cf. Jackson 1990, 2005; Sheeran 1997; de Mel 2006). Once the Portuguese had established commercial contacts with Sri Lanka at the beginning of the sixteenth century, they did not mix solely with the local Sri Lankan population. From about 1630 they also relied on the military and auxiliary assistance of mercenary African soldier-slaves – most of them probably originating from South-Eastern Africa, Madagascar and Ethiopia – whom they supposedly introduced to the island via the Indo-Portuguese settlement of Goa (Boxer 1977; de Mel 2006). While the Portuguese were, for military and imperial ends, open to miscegenation, ‘unoffi cial prejudice … ran much deeper’ (Boxer 1977: 303). Eventually, the mixing led to the emergence of diverse mestiço (Eu- ropean father and Sri Lankan mother), castiço (European father and Eurasian mother), mulato (European father and African mother) and lançado strata – the latter, Africans, at the bottom of society (Jackson 1990). In this regard, subsequent Dutch and British colonial policies diff ered much from the Portuguese approach: both Dutch and British took off ence to the Portuguese’s ‘indiscrimi- nately mixing with natives and Africans to eff ectively inject “inferior” elements of primitivism into the superior and pristine European racial stock and cultural legitimacy’, making them responsible for ‘producing “degenerate” mixed off spring’ (de Mel 2006: 4). After the British had replaced the Dutch colonial power, the Dutch term burgher (‘citizen’, ‘urbanite’) – originally limited to those serving the Dutch East India Company – started to denote any people of mixed origin in the island (de Mel 2006). Th e separation of Dutch from Portuguese Burghers can be located in the nineteenth century. Whereas the Dutch Burghers exposed a ‘specifi cally Anglo, that is, a non-Iberian European pride of race’ (Sheeran 1997: 64), those individuals that were to ‘become’ Portuguese Burghers were believed to lack an ‘Anglo-European collective consciousness’ (de Mel 2006: 100). Underlining their lower social status, they have been also called ‘Mechanics’ or ‘Mico-Burghers’ in reference to their blue-collar professions (as opposed to the white-collar jobs allegedly reserved for the Dutch Burgher group) (McGilvray 1982; de Mel 2006). Nowadays, the Portuguese Burghers are mostly Roman Catholics and are concentrated along the island’s east coast around Batticaloa and Trincomalee (Mc- Gilvray 1982). So far, no ethnographic research has been conducted on recent modes and dimensions of interethnic conviviality between the Portuguese Burghers and the rest of Sri Lanka’s population, including other creole groups. Th is lack of research may have to do with the 2004 tsunami disaster – some Portuguese Burgher communities had to resettle in the aftermath of the natural catastrophe – (McGilvray 2007, 2008) and the prolonged civil war that ended only in 2009. In the 1970s, research on the Dutch Burghers revealed that they portrayed themselves as so- Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 49 cially more advanced than the Portuguese Burghers, ascribing origins as liberated slaves to the latter and regarding them as ‘poorer, darker, more numerous and less European (than themselves)’ (McGilvray 1982; cf. Roberts 1994; de Mel 2006). Nevertheless, fi ndings from the early 1970s suggest that ‘a strict division between the Dutch and Portuguese Burghers was impossible to sustain’ (McGilvray 1982: 237) in social practice. Despite a trend towards endogamy in the 1970s, about a third of the Portuguese Burghers had either a Tamil or Sinhalese partner (Mc- Gilvray 1982) and appeared to speak Sinhalese and Tamil in daily life (cf. Smith 1977). As a result of this integrative pattern, the Portuguese Burghers were to some extent included in the caste ranking, mostly as members of middle-class craftsmen castes (McGilvray 1982). However, while descent, religion and profession appeared to serve as criteria for this ranking, they were nonetheless believed to be an ethnic group rather than a caste (McGilvray 2008). Given the limited ethnographic data, it is not clear how other ethnic groups, notably the Tamils and the dominant Singhalese, currently – after a bloody, politically ethnicized civil war that lasted more than twenty-fi ve years – position against the Portu- guese Burghers. Certainly the Buddhist, conservative-traditionalist Singhalese or so-called Arya Sinhala elite take a negative attitude towards creole cultural representations, particularly music, which they condescendingly call tuppahi (de Mel 2006) – a term apparently derived from the notion topazes, which used to refer to darker skinned people who claimed Portuguese, Christian descent (de Silva 1972). Well-known Kaffi r communities have existed in Puttalam district, about 160 km north of the country’s capital of Colombo, along the west coast. Other communities have disappeared, owing to the increasing relocation of Kaffi rs to other parts of Sri Lanka over the past hundred years. Moreover, ‘exogamy has made the descendants of Afro-Sri Lankans less conspicuous’ (de Silva Jayasuriya 2008: 162–63). At present, in terms of professional background, the Kaffi rs do not dif- fer from other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, though the ethnographies on Kaffi rs generally leave a non-elite impression. Th e ethnonym Kaffi r derives from terms denoting Africans in various languages, including Portuguese and English, going back to the Arab kafi r, which was generally applied to ‘nonbelievers’, that is, non-Muslims. Although the Portuguese had started to transplant Africans to Sri Lanka in the early seventeenth century, present-day Kaffi r oral histories rather lo- cate their ancestors’ arrival in Sri Lanka in the early nineteenth, when the British reportedly transferred them from South Africa to the island to serve as military auxiliaries. Th ese narratives are partly confi rmed by scholarly historical accounts. Altogether, the diverse information suggests various waves of Africans migrating to Sri Lanka for an extended period of time. Having themselves largely integrated into the dominant Sinhalese culture, the Kaffi rs continue to stick to Christianity, and the elders particularly are still fl uent in the island’s Luso-Creole language. Similar to the stereotypes imposed on the Portuguese Burghers, British colonial 50 Christoph Kohl prejudices and mostly negative othering used to target Kaffi rs due to their dark skin colour (de Mel 2006; de Silva Jayasuriya 2001, 2003, 2006, 2008). As in the case of Guinea-Bissau among Kristons and Cape Verdeans alike, religion and descent appear to continue to be powerful markers of boundary drawing. Conversely, whereas profession has largely ceased to be a signifi cant marker of diff erence for Luso-Creole communities in Guinea-Bissau, occupation and social status – at least in the case of the Portuguese Burghers – seemingly continues to play a role in Sri Lanka. However, the sequence of diff erent colonial powers and practices in the case of Sri Lanka – in contrast to the continuous, albeit limited and weak, colonial presence of the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau – appears to have fostered the separation between Portuguese Burghers and Dutch Burghers. Particularly Victorian othering on phenotypical, ‘racial’ grounds facilitated the emergence of elite Sinhala rejection of foreign infl uences and, consequently, creole representations, whereas in Guinea-Bissau the Kristons are, given their transethnic identity, well connected to ‘ordinary’ ethnic groups. Although Cape Verdean ‘superior’ attitudes and distancing from other Bissau-Guineans has been politically instrumentalized since late colonial times, the politicization and polarization of ethnicity is much more pronounced in Sri Lanka, aff ecting also creole culture and identity.

Contributions to National Integration Th is essay now turns to the contribution of creole culture and identity to processes of postcolonial nation-building. In Guinea-Bissau, both creole individuals and creole culture and identity as a whole contributed signifi cantly to the struggle for independence and the nation-building that followed independence. Both Cape Verdean and Kriston creoles fi gured prominently in leadership positions in the independence movement led by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea [-Bissau] and Cape Verde (PAIGC), and they dominated the armed struggle for independent state- and nationhood, as various authors have shown (e.g., Rudebeck 1974; Galli and Jones 1987; Forrest 1992; Dhada 1993). Fur- thermore, the PAIGC – led by Amílcar Cabral, himself a creole of Cape Verdean ancestry – crafted a powerful, effi cient and integrative state ideology. Political frictions, facilitated by the Portuguese to weaken the independence movement, built on the antagonism between Cape Verdeans and the ‘native’ Bissau-Guinean population, including Kristons. Creoles (and noncreoles as well) were politically divided: many Cape Verdean (and other Bissau-Guinean) activists demanded an independent binational Cape Verdean-Bissau-Guinean state, whereas others vehemently opposed a binational solution; another cluster rather favoured autonomy within Portugal’s empire. After independence, the above-mentioned transethnic character of Kriston identity and culture led the women’s organization of the victorious PAIGC to use selected representations of creole culture, such as manjuandadis, to mobilize Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 51 the female population. In colonial times, manjuandadis were found only at the former trading posts, fostering conviviality and mutuality among their predominantly female members. Nowadays, the diversifi ed character of these institutions is underlined by the highly visible music performances of some manjuandadis in particular. Ranging from formalized associations to less institutionalized networks of coworkers, neighbours, kin and friends, manjuandadis have since the 1960s also spread to the Muslim population – albeit some elite (Christian) cultural activists do not regard the latter as manjuandadis but rather as mere ‘groups’. Manjuandadis are often associated with specifi c ethnic groups, as they frequently recruit members from family or neighbourhood networks dominated by a specifi c ethnicity; nevertheless, most of them are multiethnic. Numerous manjuandadis share characteristics with commercially popular rotating credits and savings associations. Semantically, meanwhile, the age-set organizations that are common in rural, agriculture-dominated communities are also increasingly referred to as manjuandadis. In the long run, these representations have contributed to interethnic integration – transethnicization – by fostering nation-building ‘from below’. Th e postcolonial state that envisioned a new, integrated national culture developed ‘from above’ has in fact ignited a ‘bottom-up’ nation-building process. Political and economic liberalization since the late 1980s has led to the commodifi cation of manjuandadis, some of which have become professional bands for hire. Th e popularity of the manjuandadi music genre and the associations’ mutuality accelerated their further spread throughout the country (for detailed ethnographic elaborations, see Trajano Filho 1998; Kohl 2009b, 2012b). Similarly, the Luso- Creole language Kriol, hitherto spoken only by small, largely creole communities in the praças, began to spread country-wide from the 1920s in an expansion unsuccessfully countered by the colonial authorities. Th is process was likewise accelerated by the independence movement, which used Kriol as the language of instruction and command. Since independence Kriol has transformed into the country’s lingua franca, fostered by the state and its representatives across the country and in the audio media (cf. Kohl 2009b, 2011b, 2012b). According to the latest census, conducted in 2009, about 90 per cent of Guinea-Bissau’s population is fl uent in Kriol. Data on Sri Lanka is limited. Most Dutch Burghers opposed Ceylon’s independence from the United Kingdom, but nothing is known about the attitudes of Portuguese Burghers and Kaffi rs. Dutch Burghers feared marginalization, given the power of exclusive Sinhala nationalism. Indeed, once independence was achieved, the Dutch Burghers’ exposure to the ‘Sinhala Only’ policy and its excluding measures led some of them to migrate to Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom (Henry 1986; Brohier 1998). However, this process apparently also led to a redrawing of intercreole boundaries, resulting in a temporary and partial closing of ranks between Dutch and Portuguese Burghers. As regards 52 Christoph Kohl nation-building ‘from below’, the Portuguese Burghers and Kaffi rs of Sri Lanka are widely believed to be the founders of Baila, which has been one of the most popular music styles in Sri Lanka since the 1950s (Sheeran 1997; de Mel 2006). Th e origins of modern Baila can be located in Kafi rinha and Chicothi, originally cultivated by Portuguese Burghers. Kafi rinha in particular was a style of music and dance that in the nineteenth century was closely associated with poor working-class people in urban settings, including Portuguese Burghers and Kaf- fi rs. Because these groups were of mixed ancestry, Kafi rinha was subject to ‘ra- cialization’ and stigmatization by the traditionalist Sri Lankan elite, who tended to identify with Europe. Th ey continue to ascribe African origins to Kafi rinha today, associating it with ‘savageness’ and ‘brutishness’ (Jackson 1990; Sheeran 1997), even though Kafi rinha is – despite its name – predominantly an ‘Iberi- an-infl uenced vocal and dance music’ expression (de Mel 2006: 101). However, Sri Lankans seldom acknowledge African infl uences in contemporary Sri Lankan culture (Alpers 2012: 72). However, while Kafi rinha continues to be cultivated among Portuguese Burgher and Kaffi r communities, it also emerged as Sri Lan- ka’s popular Baila music more generally (Jackson 1990; Sheeran 1997). Following the introduction of radio broadcasting in the 1930s, the marginalized Luso-Creole music experienced a revival that was also infl uenced by the popularization of ‘Western’, ‘Latin’-tinged music on the radio, especially Ca- lypso. Infl uenced by the West, urbanized Sinhalese known as Samkara Sinhala became fans of Portuguese Burgher music that subsequently transformed into Waade (or Debate Baila) and the even more popular Chorus Baila, integrating infl uences from Calypso and Global North rock and pop music ‘while retaining traditional elements of verbal repartee from Chikothi and … Kaff ringna’ (de Mel 2006: 240). Diff erent from Calypso, amongst others, creole music was not considered ‘foreign’, at least not by the Samkara Sinhala – in contrast to the Arya Sinhala elite, who considered this supposedly tuppahi and insipid music a vestige of colonialism and racial miscegenation that betrayed Sri Lankan cultural values (de Mel 2006). Although Baila is nowadays considered an apolitical, ‘light’ music style, some Bailas of the 1950s also ‘covered a variety of topics that served the Sinhala nationalist cause’ (Sheeran 1997: 126). Likewise, some interpreters composed Bailas as war songs in the 1990s, when the island was increasingly drawn into a civil war that has often been characterized as an ‘ethnic confl ict’ between the dominant Sinhalese majority and the Tamils. Since the 1970s, Baila has been increasingly sung in Sinhalese and has spread across the country, taking on characteristics of commodifi cation. Despite rejections by the elite, Burghers, Samkara Sinhala and the Sri Lankan diaspora widely regard modern Baila as ‘an emblem of intra-cultural cohesion’ (de Mel 2006: 241). As for the Luso-Creole language, it long ago lost its role as a countrywide lingua franca, which it held up to the nineteenth century. It was replaced by Sin- halese as the island’s dominant language, followed by Tamil in the early twentieth Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 53 century; meanwhile, English continues to play an important role as a language of education and trade. Today the Luso-Creole language, relegated to a niche existence even among Portuguese Burghers along the east coast and Kaffi r communities in Puttalam district, runs the risk of disappearing.

Conclusion Th e research on Luso-Creole identities’ signifi cance in processes of interethnic and national integration is still in its infancy. I have examined how ‘creole’ and ‘creolization’ can be conceptualized as analytical tools serving comparative purposes and framed the notion ‘Luso-Creole’ as a cross-cultural analytical term. However, the comparison remains incomplete because historical data and ethnographic fi ndings are still disparate and fragmentary in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Nevertheless, some preliminary conclusions may be drawn concerning the evolution, appropriation and transformation of the Luso-Creole heritage in dif- ferent settings, illustrated by the examples of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka. Both countries are characterized by the hierarchical coexistence of creole groups who have manifested their supposedly higher social status by alluding to ‘European civilization’ and ‘manners’. Whereas many Cape Verdeans continue to distance themselves from other Bissau-Guineans, including even Kristons, the latter similarly draw a line between the noncreole population and themselves, portrayed as more European, that is, ‘Portuguese’. In Sri Lanka, Dutch Burghers look down on both Portuguese Burghers and Kaffi rs, ascribing them a socioculturally inferior status due to their ‘Iberian-ness’, whereas the country’s Singhalese elite regard creoles of any kind as ‘alien’ and subordinate. Sri Lankan society thus appears to be much more stratifi ed and polarized: creoles are relegated to a second row while creole identities are comparatively manifest (contrary to the complex Kriston case) owing to Dutch and British colonialism that favoured sociocultural closure and distinction more than did the Portuguese variety. Politically, diff erences are apparent: in the case of Guinea-Bissau, Luso- Creole groups tended to welcome independence, whereas Dutch and probably Portuguese Burghers in Sri Lanka took a critical stance towards independent state- hood, fearing social marginalization. Despite their numerical inferiority, creole groups have, as the examples of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka illustrate, contributed various cultural representations to national popular culture. In Guinea- Bissau, these include manjuandadi associations, amongst other features that used to be restricted to tiny Luso-Creole groups but have, since the eve of independence, transcended ethnic and religious boundaries and spread nationwide. Th is process was facilitated by the transethnic, inclusive character of Kriston identity and fuelled by the post-independence one-party socialist state, which sought mass mobilization of the population. Guinea-Bissau has been characterized by an inte- 54 Christoph Kohl grative state ideology that conceives of the nation as an umbrella covering various ethnic groups. Th e Sri Lankan case is quite diff erent. Baila has contributed to national culture, but other creole infl uences remain marginal and have added little to postcolonial nation-building, not least because Sri Lanka is marked by an exclusive and militant pro-Sinhalese nation-and-state ideology emanating from political and intellectual representatives of a Sinhala majority that strictly seeks to diff er ‘genuine’ Sri Lankan from ‘imported’ tuppahi traditions. Further research, especially in Sri Lanka, may reveal how ‘micro-politics’ and ‘policies’ infl uence Luso-Creole identity construction and maintenance, how interethnic conviviality is practised in everyday life, and how creoles actively con- textualize and reify their supposed ‘Portugueseness’. In this regard, comparative ethnographic bottom-up research may improve understanding of which factors allow for creole boundary drawing and conceptualization of ‘Portugueseness’.

Christoph Kohl is a research fellow in the research group ‘Th e Cultural Dynam- ics of Political Globalisation’ at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), Germany. He was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthro- pology in Halle (Saale) and received his Ph.D. from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2010 (‘Creole Identity, Interethnic Relations, and Postcolo- nial Nation-Building in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa.’ Ph.D. thesis. Halle (Saale): Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (2009)). His publications include ‘Diverse Unity: Creole Contributions to Interethnic Integration in Guinea- Bissau’, which appeared in Nations and Nationalism (2012).

Notes 1. Findings for Guinea-Bissau are based on both ethnographic ﬁ ndings (of research conducted in 2006–07 and 2013) and literature research. Data on Sri Lanka have been extracted from existing scholarly literature. 2. Th e Cape Verdean Windward variety of Kriol diﬀ ers only slightly from the one spoken in Guinea-Bissau.

Bryceson, D. 2010. ‘Swahili Creolization: Th e Case of Dar es Salaam’, in R. Cohen and P. Toninato (eds), Th e Creolization Reader: Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures. London: Routledge, pp. 364–75. Cardoso, H.C. 2010. ‘Th e African Slave Population of Portuguese India: Demographics and Impact on Indo-Portuguese’, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 25(1): 95–119. Castelo, C. 1999. ‘O Modo português de Estar no Mundo’: O Luso-Tropicalismo e a Ideologia colonial portuguesa (1933–1961). Porto: Edições Afrontamento. Cohen, A. 1981. Th e Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in the Dramaturgy of Power in a Modern African Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Czarniawska, B., and B. Joerges. 1996. ‘Travels of Ideas,’ in B. Czarniawska and G. Sevón (eds), Translating Organizational Change. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 13–48. de Mel, V.K. 2006. ‘Music as Symbol, Music as Emissary: A Study of the Kalypso and the Baila of Sri Lanka’, Ph.D. thesis. Los Angeles: University of California. de Silva, C.R. 1972. Th e Portuguese in Ceylon 1617–1638. Colombo: H.W. Cave. de Silva Jayasuriya, S. 2001. ‘Les cafres de Ceylan: Le Chaînon portugais’, Cahiers des Anneaux de la mémoire 3: 229–53. ———. 2003. ‘Th e African Diaspora in Sri Lanka’, in S. de Silva Jayasuriya and R. Pankhurst (eds), Th e African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean. Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press, pp. 251–88. ———. 2006. ‘Afro-Sri Lankais: Liens et Racines’, Cahiers des Anneaux de la mémoire 9: 171–86. ———. 2008. ‘Migrants and Mercenaries: Sri Lanka’s hidden Africans,’ in S. de Silva Jayas- uriya and J.-P. Angenot (eds), Uncovering the History of Africans in Asia. Leiden: Brill, pp. 155–70. Dhada, M. 1993. Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free. Niwot: University Press of Colorado. do Couto, H.H. 1994. O Crioulo Português da Guiné-Bissau. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. Ellery Mourão, D. 2009. ‘Guiné-Bissau e Cabo Verde: identidades e nacionalidades em con- strução’, Pro-Posições 20(1[58]): 83–101. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Ferraz, L.I. 1987. ‘Portuguese Creoles of West Africa and Asia’, in G.G. Gilbert (ed.), Pidgin and Creole Languages: Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke. Honolulu: University of Ha- waii Press, pp. 337–60. Forrest, J.B. 1992. Guinea-Bissau: Power, Conﬂ ict, and Renewal in a West African Nation. Boul- der: Westview Press. Galli, R.E., and J. Jones. 1987. Guinea-Bissau: Politics, Economics and Society. London and Boulder: Francis Pinter, Lynne Rienner. Governo da Guiné. 1952. Guiné: Alvorada do Império. Bolama: Tip. Of. Gráf. da Imprensa Nacional da Guiné. Hancock, I.F. 1975. ‘Malacca Creole Portuguese: Asian, African or European?’, Anthropological Linguistics 17(5): 211–36. Havik, P.J. 2004. Silences and Soundbites: Th e Gendered Dynamics of Trade and Brokerage in the Pre-colonial Guinea Bissau Region. Münster: Lit. ———. 2007. ‘Kriol without Creoles: Afro-Atlantic Connections in the Guinea Bissau Re- gion (16th to 20th centuries)’, in. N.P. Naro, R. Sansi-Roca and D.H. Treece (eds), Cul- tures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 41–73. Henry, R.J. 1986. ‘“A Tulip in Lotus Land”: Th e Rise and Decline of Dutch Burgher Ethnicity in Sri Lanka’, Ph.D. thesis. Canberra: Australian National University. 56 Christoph Kohl

Jackson, K.D. 1990. Sing without Shame: Oral Traditions in Indo-Portuguese Creole Verse. With a Transcription and Analysis of a Nineteenth-Century Manuscript of Ceylon Portuguese. Am- sterdam, Philadelphia and Macau: John Benjamins and Instituto Cultural de Macau. ———. 2005. De Chaul a Batticaloa. As Marcas do Império Marítimo Português na Índia e no Sri Lanka. Ericeira: Mar de Letras. Jacobs, B. 2009. ‘Th e Upper Guinea Origins of Papiamento: Linguistic and Historical Evi- dence’, Diachronica 26(3): 319–79. Kaufmann, M., and R. Rottenburg (eds). 2012. ‘Translation als Grundoperation bei der Wan- derung von Ideen’, in R. Lühr (ed.), Kultureller und sprachlicher Wandel von Wertbegriff en in Europa. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 219–33. Knörr, J. 2008. ‘Towards Conceptualizing Creolization and Creoleness’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Paper no. 100. ———. 2010. ‘Contemporary Creoleness; or, Th e World in Pidginization?’, Current Anthro- pology 51(6): 731–59. Kohl, C. 2009a. ‘Th e Kristons de Gêba of Guinea-Bissau: Creole Contributions to Postcolo- nial Nation-Building’, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Graduate School Society and Culture in Motion Online Working Paper. ———. 2009b. ‘Creole Identity, Interethnic Relations, and Postcolonial Nation-Building in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa’, Ph.D. thesis. Halle (Saale): Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. ———. 2011a. ‘Th e Praça of Geba: Marginalisation Past and Present as Resource’, Mande Studies 11: 73–90. ———. 2011b. ‘National Integration in Guinea-Bissau since Independence’, Cadernos de Es- tudos Africanos 20: 85–109. ———. 2011c. ‘“Lusofonia” and the Portuguese Heritage: Lusocreole Identity in West Africa and Asia’, in A.M. Correia and I.C. de Sousa (eds), Lusofonia: Encruzilhadas Culturais. Macau: Saint Joseph Academic Press, pp. 70–82. ———. 2012a. ‘Diverse Unity: Creole Contributions to Interethnic Integration in Guinea- Bissau’, Nations and Nationalism 18: 643–62. ———. 2012b. ‘Nationale Integration in Guinea-Bissau: Das Beispiel der Manjuandadis’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 137: 71–96. ———. forthcoming. ‘Ethnicity as Trope of Political Belonging and Confl ict: Cape Verdean Identity and Agency in Guinea-Bissau’, in C. Højbjerg, J. Knörr and B. Murphy (eds), Transcending Traditional Tropes: Conceptualizing Politics and Policies in the Twenty-First- Century Upper Guinea Coast. Kopytoff , I. 1987. ‘Th e Internal African Frontier: Th e Making of African Political Culture’, in I. Kopytoff (ed.), Th e African Frontier: Th e Reproduction of Traditional African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 3–84. Mark, P. 2002. ‘Portuguese’ Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth– Nineteenth Centuries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mark, P., and J. da Silva Horta. 2011. Th e Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martinus, E.F. 1996. ‘Th e Kiss of a Slave:. Papiamentu’s West-African Connections’, Ph.D. thesis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. McGilvray, D.B. 1982. ‘Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in Sri Lanka’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 24(2): 235–63. ———. 2007. ‘Th e Portuguese Burghers of Eastern Sri Lanka in the Wake of Civil War and Tsunami’, in J. Flores (ed.), Re-Exploring the Links: History and Constructed Histories between Portugal and Sri Lanka. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, pp. 325–47. Luso-Creole Culture and Identity Compared 57

———. 2008. Crucible of Confl ict: Tamil and Muslim Society on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. Durham: Duke University Press. Pina Cabral, J. 2010. ‘Lusotopia como Ecumene’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 25(74): 5–20. Reis Torgal, L. 2005. ‘De l’Empire atlantique eurafricain à la communauté des pays de langue portugaise. Réalité, mythe et utopie’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 77: 61–67. Roberts, M. 1994. ‘Th e Cultured Gentlemen: Th e Appropriation of Manners by the Middle Class in British Ceylon’, Anthropological Forum 7(1): 55–73. Roberts, M., I. Reheem and P. Colin-Th omé. 1989. People Inbetween: Th e Burghers and the Middle Class in the Tranformations within Sri Lanka, 1790s–1960s. Ratmalana: Sarvodaya Book Publishing Services. Rudebeck, L. 1974. Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilization. Uppsala: Th e Scandina- vian Institute of African Studies. Schiefer, U. 2002. Von allen guten Geistern verlassen? Guinea-Bissau: Entwicklungspolitik und der Zusammenbruch afrikanischer Gesellschaften. Hamburg: Institut für Afrika-Kunde. Sheeran, A.E. 1997. ‘White Noise: European Modernity, Sinhala Musical Nationalism and the Practice of a Creole Popular Music in Modern Sri Lanka’, Ph.D. thesis. Washington: University of Washington. Smith, I.R. 1977. ‘Sri Lanka Creole Portuguese Phonology’, Ph.D. thesis. Ithaca: Cornell University. Stewart, C. 2007. ‘Creolization, History, Ethnography, Th eory’, in C. Stewart (ed.), Creoliza- tion: History, Ethnography, Th eory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, pp. 1–25. Th ompson, R.W. 1961a. ‘O Dialecto Português de Hongkong’, Boletim de Filologia 19: 289– 93. ———. 1961b. ‘A Note On Some Possible Affi nities Between the Creole Dialects of the Old World and Th ose of the New’, in R.B. Le Page (ed.), Proceedings of the Conference on Creole Language Studies, held at the University College of the West Indies, March 28–April 4, 1959. London and New York: Macmillan, St. Martin’s Press, pp. 107–13. Trajano Filho, W. 1998. ‘Polymorphic Creoledom: Th e “Creole” Society of Guinea-Bissau’, Ph.D. thesis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. ———. 2001a. ‘Manjuandadis e tabancas: duas formas associativas em duas sociedades crioula’, Artiletra 36(37): x–xi. ———. 2001b. ‘Manjuandadis e tabancas: duas formas associativas em duas sociedades crioula (continuação)’, Artiletra 38: xx–xxii. ———. 2010. ‘Território e idade: Ancoradouros do pertencimento nas manjuandadis da Guiné-Bissau’, in W. Trajano Filho (ed.), Lugares, pessoas e grupos: As lógicas do pertencimento em perspectiva internacional. Brasília: Athalaia, pp. 225–55. Vale de Almeida, M. 2007. ‘From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde’, in C. Stewart (ed.), Creolization: History, Ethnography, Th eory. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, pp. 108–32. Valkhoff , M.F. 1966. Studies in Portuguese Creole: With a Special Reference to South Africa. Jo- hannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. ——— (ed.). 1972. New Light on Afrikaans and ‘Malayo-Portuguese’. Louvain: Éditions Peeters. Walker, I. 2005. ‘Mimetic Structuration: Or, Easy Steps to Building an Acceptable Identity’, History and Anthropology 16(2): 187–210. Chapter 3 Freetown’s Yoruba-Modelled Secret Societies as Transnational and Transethnic Mechanisms for Social Integration Nathaniel King

Introduction Sierra Leone’s history supplies the basis for understanding the geographical, psychological, emotional and political macro- and micro-fi elds on which the current signifi cance of Freetown’s secret societies is being played out. Some of the contexts are divided by centuries, but all these periods are swathed in enduring issues of identity, integration and power, among others, that are still relevant today. In 1787, a humanitarian organization, Society for the Black Poor, mobilized resources and the British government’s approval for the fi rst repatriation of a group of ex-slaves to Africa. Th e eff orts aimed not at returning them to their specifi c geographical homelands in West Central Africa, Bights of Benin, Bights of Biafra and the Gold Coast but at settling them in places considered similar to the settlements from which they and their ancestors had been uprooted by the slave trade. Th e current territory of Freetown was that chosen settlement, and the fi rst set of repatriated slaves was called the Original Settlers (Peterson 1969; Alie 1990). Although Britain had pronounced an offi cial end to the trade in slaves and slavery in 1807 and 1833, respectively (Ashcroft, Griffi ths and Tiffi n 2000), abolition was not generally enforced in all the areas where these practices were active. Britain accepted control of the coastal area where Freetown currently sits and declared it a Crown Colony in 1808. On the waters of the new colony, Britain intercepted ships that fl outed the abolition orders, redirected them to the colony and freed the intended slaves into the community of already resettled ex-slaves. Th e fi rst members of this later group, known as the Recaptives or Liberated Africans, including many captives from Nigeria, were brought in in 1808. On their resettlement in Sierra Leone, Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 59 the Recaptives maintained their original identities and practices, largely unadul- terated (Peterson 1969: 162; Fyfe 1993 [1962]: 184–87, 292). Th e communing of these settlers from various parts of Africa – people with similar but also varied experiences – led to a fusion of identities ‘through a process of creolization’ (Knörr 2010: 206) and the formation of a new community, the Creole community. An important aspect of that early Freetown Creole community was its secret societies and one of their public realizations, masquerades.1 Peterson (1969), who chronicled Freetown’s early history, notes that upon its introduction to the colony around 1850, Agugu, a secret society with roots in Nigeria, was embraced by Creoles and other ethnic groups of Sierra Leone, and by Moslems and Christians alike (Peterson 1969: 267). He contends that it gained traction because of its ‘apparent effi cacy’ (ibid.: 266–67). Yet that easy acceptance can also be explained by the fact that the Agugu fi tted with already existing practices of both the com- posite groups of resettled slaves and other Sierra Leone ethnic groups. Th e apparent Agugu-created unity lasted as long as it was the only secret society of the new community’s members. Once another secret society with Nigerian bases, the Hunters secret society (formed mainly to hunt wild animals) had emerged, the latter and the Agugu entered into contestations about which was more representative of members of the new community (ibid.: 268–69). As a result, both societies increasingly leaned towards exclusivity. Th at tendency meant that large sections of the Freetown community, Creole and non-Creole, were unable to become members of either the Agugu or the Hunters. Th e latter’s members pro- gressively portrayed themselves as superior and their society as their answer to Masonic Lodges (ibid.: 269). Th ose contested claims catalysed reconstructions of ‘we’ and ‘they’ groupness, even in non-secret-society matters.2 Th ey also had implications for the formation of a new secret society, a cross between the two older societies that enfolded those they had rejected and marginalized: the Odelay. Th e fi rst Odelay, a term that translates as ‘Lord a Mercy’, was formed between 1950 and 1952. It became the secret society of poor men, women and young people – long-term urban residents and migrants from Sierra Leone’s interior, members of the Creole group and members of other ethnic groups – who lacked the qualifi cations to become members of the then exclusive Agugu and Hunters. Today, more than 150 Odelays modelled on that fi rst Odelay operate as independent organizations with their own executives. Odelays are still meeting places for the poor and marginalized in society, but they are now distinct from the fi rst Odelay in that socioeconomically and politically powerful Sierra Leoneans and non-Sierra Leoneans have become members. In Sierra Leone, secret societies are organizations whose internal workings and activities tend to be closed to nonmembers. Members often say that their secrets are accessible only to members, and threaten harm to nonmembers who try to learn their secrets by stealth. Sierra Leone’s secret societies can be classifi ed 60 Nathaniel King into old urban societies (e.g. the Agugu and Hunters), new urban societies (like Odelays) and traditional secret societies. Except for Odelays, all of them are, for the most part, specifi c to a single sex. Some of them focus their activities on entertainment, some on medicine, some on prestige, and so on. However, many of these sodalities, at diff erent times and to varying degrees, combine two or more such emphases. Odelays are mostly urban phenomena, peculiar to Freetown and the big towns of Sierra Leone’s interior. While membership of traditional secret societies in the hinterland is compulsory, membership of Freetown’s old and new urban secret societies is not compulsory; rather, it is a matter of strategic or tac- tical choice. All Freetown-based secret societies with historical links to Yorubaland in Ni- geria, notwithstanding their secrets-embedded core, have a public side in the form of their public masquerade performances. In this context, a ‘masquerade’ is a mask-wearing fi gure that symbolizes the spirit and essence of a secret society and leads its public performance. Th at masked fi gure is normally called a ‘devil’.3 In addition, all members of Yoruba-based urban secret societies publicize their masquerades as embodying the medicine mystique. Th erefore, masquerades are a nexus of visible and invisible powers and urban secret societies’ public performances. As agreed between the providers of the information I discuss here and myself, I do not present pictures of these masquerades.4

Th e Formation of Odelays and the Linguistic Nigerian Connections All of Freetown’s older urban secret societies set minimal thresholds of socioeconomic attainment and appropriate family connections for aspiring members.5 When some of the urban poor succeeded in gaining membership in the Agugu and Hunters, their mobility within them was often limited by their un-illustrious backgrounds because placement and progress within those sodalities were eff ectively elitist (i.e. determined by affl uence and family ties). Freetown’s new secret societies responded to this exclusion and limitation by opening their membership to Freetown’s disadvantaged, irrespective of geographical background, socioeconomic standing or family pedigree. Odelays are the most important of these sodalities. All of Freetown’s Odelays share a common history of earlier exclusion and historical connection to the fi rst Odelay, whose emergence I will recount below. Modelled on the Agugu and Hunters societies, an Odelay is a cross between the two. In fact, my informants clarifi ed that the term Odelay means ‘small Ode’: ‘Ode’ is the name of the Hunters’ masquerade, and ‘-lay’ is a diminutive suffi x in the Yoruba argot that typifi es Freetown’s secret societies. Nunley asserts that Odelays came into being in mid-twentieth-century Freetown as a response to the demands of the time (Nunley 1987: 60). He goes on to present the realities of overpopulation in Freetown at the time due to a surge of migrants from Sierra Le- Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 61 one’s interior, and the resulting poor economic and health conditions and vices. He also notes the rootlessness those migrants experienced and the need they felt for some sort of urban belonging. Abdullah Honwana and de Boeck (2005), ac- knowledging Nunley (1987: 176), say that ‘the exclusionary cultural landscape in Freetown’ occasioned the emergence of the Odelay as an alternative urban space to occupy and perform in. Urban secret societies’ role in granting social integration to Freetown’s disadvantaged was attractive to prospective members of these newer secret societies. Odelays therefore developed into receptacles – as they still are – for (potential) rejects and marginalized members of the older Agugu and Hunters societies. Per- tinently, as Low (1996: 384), discussing the signifi cance of cities for diff ering claimants, points out, ‘Th e city as a site for everyday practices provides valuable insights into the linkages of the macroprocesses with the texture and fabric of human experience’. A major confl ict sprang up between older urban secret societies and newer Odelays over active claims the latter’s members made that their masquerades were ‘devils’. Many members of the Agugu and Hunters were united in their view of Odelays as mere pretenders to secret society status, challengers to their secret society hegemony. Th ese rhetorical, sometimes real confl icts persisted during my research. Despite these confl icts, members of Agugu, Hunters and Odelay societies share a functional commonality: they all use a version of the (Nigerian) Yoruba language in both secret and nonsecret societal activities. (Yoruba are not one of Si- erra Leone’s ethnic groups, but words and expressions from the Yoruba language, traceable to the Recaptives, still exist in Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, Creole.) My research showed that the use of Yoruba, often selective, increased the mystique of the new societies and was also a strategy that gave immediacy to their claims to have Nigerian origins. Th ese selected words, phrases and expressions are diff erent from the familiar ones in Sierra Leone’s Creole language. Secret society members often – apparently consciously – switch from the easily understandable Creole to the Yoruba-charged variety in a purpose-dictated diglossia.6 I found out that the key possession was not knowledge of Yoruba (the donor language) itself, but rather mastery of important expressions used to index secret society exclusivity. I also noted that the secret society members within my study areas used Yoruba argot- laden Creole to make a social statement and maintain their group’s boundary. On balance, knowledge and use of Yoruba or some expressions and words from it, and claims to the Yoruba connection seem to give members of Odelay organizations a sense of rootedness in both Sierra Leone and one of the biggest ethnic groups in the ‘big brother’, Nigeria. It came across during my interviews that membership of these Yoruba-based organizations made up for defi cits in individual members’ social standing and relative lack of in-country socioeconomic success. Nigeria’s comparative prosperity in the West Africa subregion seemingly 62 Nathaniel King provides them with not only the roots of respectability, but, by default, a distant but present canopy of care. It is also important to note that the use of Yoruba makes the workings of these secret societies inscrutable to nonmembers, and that they found their esoteric medicinal power on those grounds. Yet, arguably, this ever-present possibility of establishing prestigious external roots through membership of these organizations is related to diff ering conceptualizations of Sierra Leone nationhood, which I examine next.

Th e Bifurcated Sierra Leone Nation(s) Nationhood in Sierra Leone is an artefact of the country’s history and present realities. Until 1896, the term Sierra Leone referred only to the area currently known as Freetown. From the late nineteenth century on, however, Sierra Leone consisted of two de facto nations: the colony and the hinterland. Today, membership of Odelays has become a bridge across these two ‘nations’. Th e organization that took over the running of the colony of ex-slaves and Recaptives from the humanitarians was called the Sierra Leone Company. Its main responsibility was to make the new settlement viable and the settler community self-sustaining in the long run. Th e Crown Colony declared by the Brit- ish in 1808 lay over what is currently Freetown. One of the reasons given for the declaration was that the Sierra Leone Company ‘could not succeed as a commercial venture’ (Peterson 1969: 34). Th e declaration of the Crown Colony meant that the inhabitants of the colony were British subjects while the interior was a diff erent sovereign sphere, with its own people and leaders. In reality, though, the interior functioned as an appendage to the declared Crown Colony. Th e hinterland’s natural resources, like groundnuts, eff ectively fi nanced the running of the smaller Crown Colony (Fyfe 1993 [1962]). Th at larger interior then was a nominal ‘Protectorate’, loosely and insidiously policed by the Frontier Police Force, which was charged with keeping watch over the British frontier in Sierra Leone. As Fyfe notes, ‘Th e protected area, sometimes called the “Protectorate”, though as yet no Protectorate was offi cially proclaimed, was not subject to British jurisdiction’ (Fyfe 1993[1962]: 487). Britain’s formalization of control over the Protectorate was given impetus by France’s hot pursuit of the warrior Samori Touré and his troops in the area that is present-day Guinea, after the marauding troops had entered an area of nominal British control. Th e wording of the resulting formalization points to the bifurca- tion of nation or nations referred to in the heading of this sub-section, arguing:

Th e Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1890, consolidating a series of earlier acts, empowered the Crown to exercise any jurisdiction as if by right of cession or conquest. An Order-in-Council of August the 28th 1895 de- Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 63

clared that the Crown had acquired jurisdiction in foreign countries ad- joining the Colony. On August the 31st 1896 a Protectorate was formally proclaimed, as ‘being best for the people’… (Fyfe 1993 [1962]: 541)

Th is shows that the distinction between Freetown on the one hand and Sierra Leone beyond Freetown on the other is a geopolitical and sociocultural division rooted in colonial history. Th is division informed realizations and constructions of exclusion, marginality and margins – with Sierra Leone’s interior being at the margins imaginary of the Sierra Leone nation (Richards 1996). Vivek Srivastava and Marco Larizza (2011), referring to Hanlon (2005) and Kieh (2005), have also observed that ‘the areas outside Freetown had traditionally been excluded and marginalized’. Th e bifurcated nation not only shaped relationships between people in the city and people in (or from) the interior for a long time, but also tellingly bred discourses of ‘Freetonians’ versus ‘people from “up country”’ or ‘those who were here [Freetown]’ and ‘those who came’ (i.e. migrants from the interior). My research indicates that membership of an Odelay was a means for ‘people from up country’ to become ‘Freetonians’, and for marginal actors to identify as members of a Sierra Leonean nation. Freetown’s ‘secret society belt’ is and has been an area where these twin happenings occur. Th e foregoing demonstrates that histories, offi cial policies, lived realities and actors’ determination to exert their social relevance against many odds shaped the conceptions of and reactions to Sierra Leone’s nation imaginary. Th ey also created stages where these issues were played out. Because resettled ex-slaves, Recaptives, migrants from the Sierra Leone’s interior and poor Freetown residents found it hard to succeed in broader society, I argue, they built backstage secret societies to gain a foothold on the frontstage of broader Freetown society. Th erefore, we can understand the enduring signifi cance of Yoruba-based secret societies, especially Odelays, by situating them in Goff man’s frame of stages.7 Abolition of the slave trade and slavery worked together with British colonial policy to bring people from many parts of Africa to what later became the Sierra Leone Colony. A shared history enabled them to draw on Yoruba-based secret societies as joint possessions (inherited common backstages). Yet, as time went on, these organizations’ inclusivity metamorphosed into exclusivity, prompting the formation of perceivably more inclusive ‘grass-roots’ organizations like Odelays. Many of Freetown’s poor and mainly migrant populations who lacked the backstages of family pedigree and bequeathed wealth, for example, became members of Odelay organizations and used them as backstages, fortifi ed by secrets, to give themselves relevance on Freetown’s front stages. But actors on the newer urban secret society backstages also made use of other backstages of shared history and Yoruba origins to (re)connect with older urban secret societies such as the Agugu 64 Nathaniel King and Hunters. Th at hindmost backstage, as we shall see in the next sections, gave members of the fi rst Odelay grounds to contest the older secret societies.

Freetown’s Secret Society Belt and the ‘Lord a Mercy’ Odelay Prototype Story Th e area I refer to as the secret society belt covers some of the most heavily populated communities in Freetown, such as Fourah Bay, Kroo Bay and Foulah Town. Many of the belt’s residents are migrants from other areas, including Sierra Leone’s interior. It is instructive that these migrant-heavy areas have the highest concentra- tion of Yoruba-modelled secret societies, especially Odelay organizations. Many poor migrants from Sierra Leone’s interior and less well-off Freetoni- ans such as those marginalized in or from older urban secret societies used membership of Odelay secret societies jointly for urban social integration. It was also instrumental in generating fear-born respect and acceptance from other Sierra Leoneans whose status derived from sources other than Odelay secret societies. Membership of these societies off ers places of abode, jobs, job promotions and support in times of pressing need. Now, the entertainment value of Odelays is becoming merely incidental. Nunley (1987) refers to the post-World War II years as the period of Odelays’ conception. Old members of Odelay societies and nonmembers alike corroborated this in my interviews. Nunley further regards Alikalis as the prototype of Odelays (Nunley 1987: 51). Alikalis were ragtag Freetown boys’ societies of the 1940s and 1950s. Th eir members were noted for their proclivity for violence and crime, including theft. My informants held that Alikalis’ defi ning image was that of their typically jobless members stealing from onlookers and residents in the areas their masquerades passed through. Nunley’s (ibid.) observation that members of Alikalis were called ‘wharf rats’ illustrates the perceived general criminality of these groups’ members. One of my informants summed up the Alikalis’ objectives as ‘wanting to mount a one-day show which raised eyebrows and some cash, mainly illicitly’. Importantly, old Alikali members whom I spoke to did not claim Alikalis were secret societies. I further learned that Alikalis never rose above being mainly disparate juvenile groups. Th erefore, many of my informants argued against the view that Alikalis were potentially Odelays’ prototype, as their objectives diff ered from the goals driving what evolved into Odelays. Alikalis were really forerunners to Odelays, not their prototype. From my fi ndings, I can deduce that the emergence of ‘Lord a Mercy’ was a summary of the issues, actions and actors that engendered the Odelay phenomenon. Formed in the 1950s, Lord a Mercy had a membership like that of the Alikalis: mainly unemployed young people and others living in precarious situations.8 Although Lord a Mercy had some ‘wharf rats’, it was a shade above Alikalis because its chief characteristic was not crime but its members’ aspiration Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 65 to make it a creditable alternative to Agugu and Hunters societies in Freetown’s secret society landscape. It was like an Alikali without the overt criminal content. At its founding, Lord a Mercy was led by a Christian Creole who was a member of both Hunters and Agugu secret societies but came from a poor family and thus had little chance of attaining a controlling role in them. Th at Creole leader had the respect of many young men, especially non-Creole migrants from the country’s interior who hoped to become members of a secret society in Free- town. Th e majority of these young men were unqualifi ed for membership into the two older Yoruba-modelled societies because they were poor and jobless, and lacked reputable backgrounds or the requisite metaphorical backstages. Some carried the baggage of being past members of the hugely discreditable Alikalis. Th ey therefore rallied around the Christian Creole man to ‘build their own devil’ in the Brookfi elds and Saint John areas of central Freetown. Th e Lord a Mercy masquerade’s maiden public appearance by itself contested the established order and was thus a source of tension between the members of this group and those of the Agugu and Hunters societies. Th is fi rst Lord a Mercy public performance took place on a public holiday when other established urban secret societies also performed.9 More challeng- ingly, the Lord a Mercy masquerade looked just like the older Hunters’ masquerade. Members had themselves composed most of their songs for that fi rst public outing, but they also sang some Yoruba songs more commonly associated with the Hunters. More, the group incensed the older societies by calling their masquerade a ‘devil’. Clearly, the new group was tapping the resources of a Cre- ole secret society insider (their leader), albeit a marginalized one, to make itself recognized. Members of the Agugu and Hunters saw this new reality as an aff ront to their medicine-mystique hegemony. Consequently, they made a stand to chas- ten the perceived dangerous idlers and discourage Lord a Mercy’s continuance. It is rumoured that during that fi rst performance, members of the Agugu and Hunters, drawing on their common Yoruba origins, united and used magical powers to unsettle the new masquerade and its followers; but the Creole leader of the group, who stood in front of the masquerade drawing on that same Yoruba backstage, rendered the assaulting powers ineff ectual on the frontstage of social contestation for urban recognition. Subsequently the challenge became physical, as young members of the older societies fought with those of the new group. Lord a Mercy was not the group’s original name. One informant said it had carried the name of its Creole founder. Two others said the group had not had a name, adding that its name came from the physical violence of the street fi ghts in that fi rst outing, in which members of both sides sustained serious injuries. Reportedly, supporters of the older secret societies came off worse. Reprisals continued throughout central Freetown as members of the new group attacked the older sodalities’ perceived members and sympathizers with sticks and broken bottles. It was reported that during the fi ghting, some Freetown residents who 66 Nathaniel King had been traumatized by the just-ended Second World War and the many violent economic-stringency-related strikes in Freetown shouted in desperation and resignation from their verandas and behind trellised windows, ‘Lord a mercy! Lord a mercy O!’ (i.e. May the Lord have mercy on us!). Th at was how the group got its name – which it maintained, because of the fear and attendant forced recognition that accidental moniker had generated. Lord a Mercy’s story shows that violence is a resource used by claimants of rights to space in the city, especially when other means are obviated. Th is gives credence to Holston’s view that ‘people use violence to make claims on the city and use the city to make violent claims’ (1999: 16). On today’s Freetown secret societies stage, Lord a Mercy is not one of the fi ve largest Odelay organizations. Still, many of its members and members of other Odelay organizations believe that Lord a Mercy, by mounting an alternative trans-secret societal outfi t, aes- thetically so similar yet compositionally so diff erent from the established secret societies in the city, was seminal to the now fl ourishing Odelay phenomenon. I argue that widespread poverty among society’s disadvantaged had weakened the national embrace. Th is informed the formation of Odelays and inspired the disadvantaged to draw on backstages of secret societies and transnational connections to succeed on the frontstage of open society in Freetown and even Sierra Leone. Th e thesis of the weak national embrace could be linked to what I consider to be a community of shared lived realities and circumstances, considered next.

Urban Secret Societies and the Community of Shared Lived Realities Guided by my ﬁ ndings, I analyse nationhood from a perspective of shared lived realities and circumstances. A community of shared lived realities and circumstances, I maintain, bonded members of the early Creole community that evolved from freed slaves. Odelays emerged in the 1950s, when the divide between the interior and the capital had not yet been bridged. Since Sierra Leone was still putatively understood as Freetown, I argue that the emergence of Odelays was a route to the nation imaginary.10 Young migrants from the provinces and the urban unemployed and unemployable became members of Odelays. Pointedly, many of the ﬁ rst executive members of Freetown Odelays were not Creoles but came from ethnic groups of the hinterland.11 Sometimes, membership of Odelays has been a platform from which some members launched bids to be inducted into the relatively high-standing Agugu and Hunters societies. Currently, all three sodalities share complementarities of mutual memberships, aesthetics and songs, and use the same Yoruba argot. In addition, all three organizations’ members refer to their societies using the Yoruba generic term Awo, which has two meanings: (1) an esoteric-medicinal brotherhood/community, and (2) the spirit that all Yoruba-modelled secret societies jointly lay claim to. Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 67

A community of shared lived realities and circumstances feeds on, and is in turn fed by, a community of history. Th e resulting mutual reinforcements inform the fellow-feeling that Odelay members show to one another and to members of other Yoruba-modelled secret societies like the Agugu and Hunters. Th is fellow- feeling for a secret society member, I maintain, cuts across political party and ethnic sensibilities in Freetown in particular and Sierra Leone in general. Awo is thus the transnational, invoked to valorize the Sierra Leonean. Yoruba-modelled secret society fellow-feeling is thus an infrastructure that could be argued to (1) promote nationhood, (2) undermine nationhood or (3) (re)present an alternative to nationhood. Because membership of Yoruba-modelled urban secret societies binds Sierra Leoneans from across varied divides, this membership summons a fervour that the offi cial nation does not necessarily muster. To test the strength of an urban secret society’s fellow-feeling for its own members in relation to others, I asked fi fty-fi ve members of Odelays the following question: ‘If you were in a public position of trust and you had a job to off er, whom would you give it to: a member of your secret society or a non-member?’ All of the respondents answered that they would give the job to a fellow Yoruba-based secret society member. Th e responses to follow-up questions were also remarkable. I asked, ‘If you found out that two people came forward for this same job and that the person who was not a member of your secret society was qualifi ed, while your fellow secret society member was not, whom would you give the job to?’ Forty-seven said they would give the job to the unqualifi ed secret society member – male or female. Many of them clarifi ed that they would feel safe(r) working with a fellow secret society member, adding that they saw it as a moral imperative ‘to help a society brother or sister’. Respondents also said that they ‘would qualify’ the fellow secret society member once he or she got the job. All of this shows that shared secret society memberships substitute other considerations like merit, ability and ethnic background. An Odelay elder told me the following story, which could explain the fastness of the bond. In the 1960s a highly placed member of the then ruling political party in Sierra Leone was fi nding it diffi cult to gain enough support for his party in the secret society belt. Th ough he was a member of the exclusive Agugu, he was not a member of any Odelay. Still, though, the politician calculatedly sought to gain the support his party badly needed in that contested, votes-rich area through Odelays and other Yoruba-modelled secret societies by liberally preaching the common histories of the secret societies and the mutually possessed Awo. Th e relative ease of gaining membership of Odelays – which is not based on socioeconomic or family status – meant that this politician would benefi t from the huge ‘vote banks’ (Das and Poole 2005) in the secret society belt. Th e government offi cial’s political party was not, according to the elder who nar- rated this story to me, the party that many members of the Odelay had been 68 Nathaniel King supporting. But he and his fellow members of Odelays eventually supported the highly-placed government offi cial, the elder explained, summarizing why Odelay and cognate Yoruba societies had made common cause with fellow secret society members: ‘We supported the “highly-placed offi cial” because Awo does not know diff erence in party or tribe; it demands that we support a fellow secret society brother and fi ght for him as a body. Everywhere he cries, we cry with him [whenever he has a need of whatever sort, we rush to his aid]’. Th is ‘common cause with kind’ feature of urban secret societies marks a strand of association that transcends the generally recognized group identities of ethnic group and nationality in Freetown. Importantly, the strength and utility of that bond go against the state’s refrain of the nation being the prime source of mobilization. Members of Odelays do not eschew the nation; they craft mechanisms below the level of the nation to invigorate their claim to nationhood in Sierra Leone. Because Odelays are transethnic, trans-social and transnational groups in both their origins and their current standings, they embrace members across countries and across nationalities as well. Odelays’ pastiche-like character gives the organizations roots, trunks and branches in many places and makes them simultaneously a local and global phenomenon. Th ey are resources that bear fruit as well.

How the Transnational Awo Aff ects Family Ties and Unifi es Perceived Enemies How does the Awo bond aff ect the biological family? To fi nd answers, I asked relatives of diasporans who had returned to Sierra Leone in 2008 for public performances of their Odelay organizations for their views on diasporans’ relationship with the Odelays they belonged to. Th is view, from a sister of one of the diasporans, was typical:12 ‘My brother has been with his Odelay [meaning, the organization and/or its masquerade] since he was a boy. So, when he went overseas he never forgot about it. He supports his Odelay. From what I understand, his Odelay brothers helped him to become strong [successful] over there [in the United States]’.13 However, some relatives of diasporans expressed concern that their relatives in the diaspora paid more attention to their Odelays than they did to their families in Sierra Leone. One respondent could not hide his distress and pointed to his and his younger brother’s poverty. Calling that younger brother forward so that I could see him, he said, ‘Just look at us. He does not pay attention to us. When he comes to Sierra Leone, he gives all his money to his “devil”’. Th e younger brother nodded his head in agreement, interjecting, ‘Th at is how he treats us, his own blood’. At the end of my interview, I asked the older brother whether he and his indigent brother planned to become members of the Odelay organization their brother in Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 69 the diaspora belonged to. After some refl ection, he concluded, ‘Maybe. We will think about it. Maybe that is the way we can benefi t from our brother.’ Th e discussions above show that in Freetown and even in Sierra Leone at large, membership of secret societies, including Odelays, is increasingly the basis on which material and nonmaterial resources are mobilized, negotiated and allo- cated. It is below the nation, but it shapes the offi cial nation and the traditionally familial. Because Odelay memberships are mainly founded on shared lived experiences and informed spaces, Odelays can also be spaces of transnational interaction, where similarity can be fabricated out of or in spite of diff erence, even diff erence from perceived enemies. In the following I examine how an Odelay performance became a platform on which allies in Sierra Leone’s civil war, including Nigerian soldiers, ‘danced devil’ with their adversaries – rebels they had been fi ghting against for years. Th e Sierra Leonean Foday Sankoh was head of the Revolutionary United Front rebels that launched Sierra Leone’s civil war from Liberia in 1991. Decades before he started the war, Sankoh reportedly became a member of a Freetown Odelay, Civili Rule, though apparently not a very active member. In the mid 1990s, when Sierra Leone’s soldiers proved incapable of thwarting the rebels’ advance, the government requested help from a regional West African body, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Th e majority of soldiers in that intervention force were Nigerian. Many of the Nigerian contingent of the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) became members of Free- town’s Yoruba-modelled secret societies like the Agugu, Hunters and Odelays, including Civili Rule. I was told that the Yoruba soldiers had been impressed by some of the urban secret society members’ use of Yoruba words and expressions, and actually spoke pidgin Yoruba, so to speak, with them. On 27 April 2000, Foday Sankoh paid to carry the Civili Rule Odelay’s symbolic gun – the bila gun – just outside the Odelay’s headquarters.14 Informants told me that Sankoh eff ectively played the socioeconomic youth card to carry the gun, arguing that he had started the civil war to empower youth and now wanted to use a mass youth phenomenon, the Civili Rule Odelay masquerade’s performance, to announce his intentions to end the civil war.15 During that Civili Rule public performance, soldiers of Sierra Leone’s national army and the regional fi ghting group wore coloured clothes – a secret society requirement for taking part in the masquerade’s public performance. In this festive atmosphere, the soldiers mixed with the chief protagonist of the war, Sankoh, and his fi ghters – with whom they were technically still at war. Th e masquerade’s dance was a national ceasefi re dance performed on urban grounds to make a statement to the nation. Foday Sankoh made use of the magnetism of a youth performance-based occasion to appeal to Sierra Leoneans as a man 70 Nathaniel King of peace. It could have been mere theatrics, but followers of that masquerade performance recalled that while handling the shotgun, he announced, ‘Young people of Sierra Leone, we are all one; the fi ghting is over’. Th e onlookers and the followers of the masquerade performance shouted and clapped, in anticipation of the prolonged war’s end. Sankoh had sensed the ethnic diversity and size of the masquerade’s following and attempted to rally the nation – from the grassroots up – to the peaceful intentions he advertised on that platform. Th e drama could not have been lost on some Sierra Leoneans. Th e day of the masquerade’s performance, 27 April 2000, was the country’s Independence Day, a national holiday. Th e then president of Sierra Leone, Alhaji Ahmad Tejan-Kabbah, had made his Independence Day speech on national radio that morning, assuring all that he was working towards the consolidation of peace. His was a call to the offi cial nation; Sankoh’s was an attempt to speak to the nation from below with a multiform Odelay licence. But after the ‘devil dance’ later that evening, the ECOWAS and Sierra Leone Army soldiers returned to their battalions, regiments and companies; and some rebel fi ghters who had come to town for the masquerade’s performance returned to their temporarily abandoned bastions. Th e war was back on. Brothers and sisters in performance once more became adversaries on the bigger national stage. When the civil war offi cially ended in 2002, many Nigerian Yoruba soldiers reportedly danced a farewell ‘devil dance’ before departing for the Nigerian homeland. Some still support the Nigerian/Yoruba secret society diaspora in Sierra Leone.

Conclusions Odelay secret societies serve as interethnic, transethnic and transnational links as well as encapsulations of perceived enemies. Th ese organizations’ relevance traverses Sierra Leone’s history – from slavery and the slave trade to the prewar era, war years and postwar period. Memberships of and across Yoruba-modelled secret societies and the exca- vation of the Nigerian connection in an urban fi eld of ways and means have become roots and routes to the Freetown cityscape and Sierra Leone, at large. Because the offi cial nation is a weak and ineff ective enfolding, a large group of the socioeconomically disadvantaged has been situationally fused in a community of shared lived experiences and circumstances that substitutes the offi cial nation in everyday interactions and calculations. Th at community has history as a key dimension, making it possible for Freetown’s new secret societies to cultivate, tap and uncover their Nigerian Yoruba origins. Odelays and allied secret societies are living transnational, transethnic and, increasingly, trans-status transactional organisms with roots, trunks, shoots and branches – all nurtured by water from (trans)Atlantic history and the fertilizer of current circumstances. Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 71

Nathaniel King currently is Principal of Banktec College of Information Tech- nology, Accountancy and Management in Freetown and a consultant on mining and governance in the World Bank’s Governance and Inclusive Institutions Unit. He earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for So- cial Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. His research interests are managing natural resources for conﬂ ict prevention; youth as a tactic and strategy; nationhood(s); symbolic powers, including rhetorical; the state as a central and marginal concept; the anthropology of policy; and diversity management. His recent publications include the UN-commissioned Citizens’ Perceptions of Sierra Leone’s Ethno-Political Divide and Diversity Management (2013) and (with Peter Albrecht), ‘Secret Societies and Order-Making in Freetown’, in Policing and the Politics of Order Making (Routledge, 2014).

Notes 1. Th ese are diff erent from Brazilian masquerades, which tend to be related to carnival. Un- fortunately, the secret society members who provided the bulk of the information I discuss and analyse here did not permit me to take or reproduce pictures of their masquerades. 2. On ‘we’ and ‘they’ groupness, see Elwert (1997). 3. ‘Devil’ here refers to a secret society’s masquerades. Nunley (1987: xv), writing about the aesthetics of Odelays, points out that the ‘devil’ characterization goes back to early missionary activities in Sierra Leone. Christian missionaries wanted to present masquerades to new converts as symbols of Satan, the antithesis of the Almighty God. Th is was meant to discourage them from becoming members of sodalities that had/have masquerades as one of their manifestations. Secret societies use(d) this negative appellation to their advantage to generate fear among nonmembers. Th e term ‘devil’ is now also used to mean the secret societies themselves. 4. Like other secret sodalities, Freetown’s secret societies, including Odelays, privilege their secrets. I noticed this in the organized isolation of one elderly member of an Odelay organization who was deemed to have been too cooperative with a foreign researcher. Th e man informed me that his status in the society had been signifi cantly reduced because he had given information and pictures to the researcher, who went on to publish a book containing the disclosed information and images. Other older members, he said, had accused him of speaking and showing too much, especially to a white man: ‘Th ey said that I had brought the inside to the outside; but I know I did not say or give anything to the researcher which would have made our society less-respected or less-feared. God forbid’, he concluded. Yet his relative isolation, based on that perceived indiscretion from about thirty years ago, persists unto the present. 5. Th ose preclusions, this study found, were the primary reason for the formation of Odelays, though it is popularly thought instead to be that some disrespectful young people in Free- town felt a need to challenge older secret societies’ status quo. 6. Ottenheimer (2012: 317) defi nes diglossia as occurring ‘when the varieties of language that coexist are diff erent versions of the same language than diff erent languages … [and] a situation in which two or more varieties of the same language [are used] by speakers in 72 Nathaniel King

diff erent kinds of settings … for diff erential access to power and prestige, or intimacy and authenticity’. 7. See Goff man (1994 [1959]: 107–14). 8. My informants, some of whom were not members of Lord a Mercy, supplied the dates 1950, around 1951 and 1952. Th ere did not seem to be a record of Lord a Mercy coming into being. Th is is probably the reason it is not considered the fi rst Odelay. Paddle Odelay’s members contend that Paddle was the fi rst. Some of Paddle’s older members describe Paddle as the fi rst approved and registered Odelay. Many older non-Lord a Mercy interviewees argued that Lord a Mercy was a mere imitation, an unruly challenge to the secret society status quo. 9. One of my insider informants said Boxing Day; two others said Easter Monday. 10. Faulks observes that ‘poverty, discrimination and exclusion can all undermine the benefi ts of citizenship. Th us a consideration of citizenship must also involve an examination of the conditions that make it meaningful’ (Faulks 2000: 3). 11. Recently, the trend has been that Creoles feature prominently in the executives. 12. From interviews carried out from 16 December 2008 to 8 February 2009. 13. Th e use of ‘brother’ here is metaphorical. 14. A bila is a hunting gun, symbolically used by its carrier to shepherd the masquerade and its followers during public performances. Informants told me that bila was a Yoruba argot word for the imperative ‘go away’ (by implication driving enemies away from the masquerade) or the verb ‘to shepherd’. In an exemplifi cation of what Højbjerg (2005: 148) calls ‘the political use of symbolism’, politicians believe that carrying the bila gun is equal to marshalling and controlling the support of participants in masquerades’ public performances, and is hence a prized political statement. People already in politics and those intending to go into it thus clamour to wield it. 15. I distinguish between youth in age terms and socioeconomic youth in King (2007) and King (2012).

References Alie, Joe A. D. 1990. A New History of Sierra Leone. Hong Kong: Macmillan. Ashcroft, B., G. Griffi ths and H. Tiffi n. 2000. Post-colonial Studies: Th e Key Concepts. London: Routledge Das, V., and D. Poole (eds). 2005. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Elwert, G. 1997. ‘Switching of We-Group Identities: Th e Alevis as a Case among Others’, in K. Kehl-Bodrogi, B. Kellner-Heinkele and A. Otter-Beaujean (eds), Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Near East. Leiden: Brill, pp. 65–85. Faulks, K. 2000. Citizenship. London: Routledge. Fyfe, C. 1993 [1962]. A History of Sierra Leone. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goff man, E. 1994 [1959]. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin. Hanlon, J. 2005. ‘Is the International Community Helping to Recreate the Preconditions for War in Sierra Leone?’, Th e Round Table: Th e Commonwealth Journal of International Aff airs 94(381): 459–72. Højbjerg, C. 2005. ‘Masked Violence: Ritual Action and the Perception of Violence in an Up- per Guinea Ethnic Confl ict’, in N. Kasfelt (ed.), Religion and African Civil Wars. London: Hurst, pp. 147–71. Holston, J. 1999. Cities and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press. Secret Societies as Mechanisms for Social Integration 73

Honwana, A., and Filip De Boeck (eds). 2005. Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Post Colonial Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Kieh, G. 2005. ‘State-Building in Post-Civil War Sierra Leone’, African and Asian Studies 4(1–2): 163–85. King, N. 2007. Confl ict as Integration: Youth Aspiration to Personhood in the Teleology of Sierra Leone’s Senseless War. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrika Institutet. ———. 2012. ‘Contested Spaces in Post-War Society: “Th e Devil Business” in Freetown Sierra Leone Africa’, Ph.D. thesis. Halle (Saale): Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Knörr, J. 2010. ‘Out of Hiding? Strategies of Empowering the Past and Reconstruction of Krio Identity’, in J. Knörr and W. Trajano Filho (eds), Th e Powerful Presence of the Past: Integra- tion and Confl ict along the Upper Guinea Coast. Leiden: Brill, pp. 205–30. Low, S.M. 1996. ‘Th e Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Th eorizing the City’, Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 383–409. Nunley, J.W. 1987. Moving with the Face of the Devil. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ottenheimer, H. 2012. Th e Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropol- ogy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Peterson, J. 1969. Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787–1870. London: Faber & Faber. Richards, P. 1996. Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey. Srivastava, V., and M. Larizza. 2011. ‘Decentralization in Postconfl ict Sierra Leone: Th e Genie Is out of the Bottle’, i n P. Chuhan-Pole and M. Angwafo (eds), Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent. Washington D.C: World Bank, pp. 141–54.

Part II Diasporic Entanglements

Chapter 4 Contested Transnational Spaces Debating Emigrants’ Citizenship and Role in Guinean Politics Anita Schroven

Introduction

Th ey have no idea what they are talking about – they have no right to speak to us like that. Th ey are not Guineans! (Forécariah, February 2007)

Such comments were commonly heard in Guinea during February 2007, when a wave of national strikes brought the country to a standstill and, once again, to the verge of a national crisis. ‘Th ey’ referred to Guineans living abroad and voicing their opinions over the radio concerning recent events in their country of origin. In Forécariah, a small town in coastal Guinea, ‘they’ were usually referred to as ressortissants Guinéens – Guineans living abroad. Th e word ressortissant indicates someone who has left his or her place of origin to make a living in the capital city or elsewhere, and in this speciﬁ c context, someone who went abroad. ‘Us’, on the other hand, were the local listeners, people assembled around a radio at home or in a street-side cafe – and implicitly all Guineans in a country that had experienced increasing economic hardship and political turmoil throughout the last decade. Th e debates over the rights and duties of Guineans living abroad took place against a background of mounting political tension between Guinea’s government and trade unions. Th e unions were protesting against declining living conditions due to failing economic policies and gross economic mismanagement of the country’s abundant resources. From 2006 to early 2007, these economically motivated demonstrations evolved into demands for a personnel change in government and profound reforms of economic and political policy.1 In a context of heated local debates about the national strikes and rising tensions countrywide, a growing perception of a dichotomy between the local population and Guineans living abroad could clearly be detected. Th e people discussing such matters even accepted and promoted the idea of denying ‘them’ Guinean citizenship. 78 Anita Schroven

What were the motivations and implications of this demand? What were the commentators truly saying when they asserted that Guineans abroad did not possess the right to express opinions on the political situation of their home country? Th ese leading questions guide this chapter’s investigation into the transnational public space that Guineans have created between their country of origin and new places of settlement. While the contested domain in this example is the right and duty of political participation, it is also an integral part of the larger transnational space created by migrants from and local communities within Guinea. Th erefore, the political debates on the participation of ressortissants and their particular responsibilities are based on the general negotiations concerning the actual and desired relations between the local population and those living abroad. After brieﬂ y considering the Guinean transnational community’s establishment and its increased possibilities for participation in the political life of its country of origin, I will examine how one particular community in that home country reacted to such outside participation. Most studies of transnational communities focus on the political activities of emigrants, but here I am interested in how those ‘at home’ debated issues related to the political opinions and demands of migrants abroad. I present three diﬀ erent phases of this debate that spanned several months and focused on various aspects of political engagement: (1) notions of the ressortissants as the Guinean people’s ambassadors to the international community; (2) the question of whether being absent from the country constitutes a negation of the ressortissants’ Guinean nationality; and (3) the perception that those who live abroad dominate national politics to the detriment of those living in Guinea. Th ough I separate these three phases for the purposes of analysis, they are in fact highly interdependent. Taken together, they reveal the ambiguous stance that Guineans living at home take towards the Guinean transnational community in general and towards their rights and duties as political actors, and hence as citizens, in particular.

A Transnational Community’s Political Participation: Considerations for Guinea Th e term ‘transnational community’ has gained prominence in the social sciences since advances in the globalization of technology, mobility, migration and political discourse have established an ever evolving web of connections transcending the borders and boundaries of the nation state. In the analysis, some have been identiﬁ ed as diasporas – collectives of people residing outside of their country of origin due to forced migration, establishing new lives in new places but using the country of origin as the main reference for their individual and collective identities. Such foundations may lead to a permanent politicization of the collective identity into a diaspora. Contested Transnational Spaces 79

Aihwa Ong (2003) and Rogers Brubaker (2005) warn against the analytical confl ation of ‘transnational communities’ and ‘diaspora’ that is largely due to the expanding use of the latter term. ‘Diaspora’ is used to designate a politically motivated community in exile, whereas ‘transnational’ denotes communities that originate from increased mobility and migration more extensive than an expulsion of one particular group. I support Ong’s contention that these diverse transnational communities should not be identifi ed collectively as politically motivated and also, implicitly, as dissidents opposed to the government of their country of origin. Processes termed ‘transnational’ are not new today, nor were they new when countries such as Guinea became independent. Many authors argue that the intensity of the migratory, social, economic and political processes occurring across and beyond national spaces should be distinguished from previous processes of migration (see Appadurai 1991; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Faist 2000). In recent years, these heterogeneous groups, subsumed under the collective term ‘transnational communities’, have come under scientifi c scrutiny with regard to their economic ties to their places of origin, for example in national or hometown (development) associations. Th at research has laid the groundwork for the consideration of their political (and advocacy) engagement in both the hosting societies and the countries of origin (M. Smith 1994; Portes 1996; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Itzigsohn 2000; Bauböck 2003). Transnational communities’ confl ict-fuelling or peace-building activities and infl uences in countries suff ering war and civil strife have been studied (Sheff er 2003; Prikkalainen and Abdile 2009; Hoehne et al. 2010; Schlee and Schlee 2012). Such examples highlight collective activities by otherwise potentially unconnected people, all engaged in creating a transnational political space that links communities abroad with their home country. Just as hometown associations are established in communities abroad, so too are chapters of political parties, with party politics and election campaigns taking place in several countries at once. In response, the ‘sending countries’ attempt to infl uence their emigrants living permanently abroad by extending citizenship, electoral and other sociopolitical benefi ts to them (see Wang 1993; R. Smith 2003;). Itzigsohn (2000: 1127) claims that this highly institutionalized political space where migrants engage is what shapes the present-day era of migration as a whole. Th is proclaimed new era of transnational migration does not mean that political engagement beyond the borders of a given country is a recent phenomenon. Th e colonial period established important institutional ties in this context. In the Guinean colony, direct political representation in the French parliament began with the Fourth Republic, whose constitution had been drafted in collaboration with political leaders in France’s West African colonies between 1944 (the Brazzaville Declaration) and 1946, when the constitution went into eff ect. At the same time, the colony also established territorial councils, to which some 80 Anita Schroven members were appointed by the governor and others elected by select groups of colonial subjects (Chafer 2002: 55ff .).2 Although political participation during the end of the colonial period may have been reserved for the elites and taken place only in colonial centres or in Paris, these eff orts were closely observed and discussed among the broader population (cf. Schmidt 2005). Colonies, the métropole and regional institutions such as the Afrique Occi- dentale Française (AOF) struggled to deal with the mobility of politicians and the electorate, elections being the only form of political participation that was possible until political parties were founded starting in 1948. Some members of parliament or the territorial council represented a constituency from which they did not originate. Questions about whether voters who were eligible to vote within Guinea could participate in elections while residing in other colonies – and whether they would vote for their Guinean council member or that of their colony of current residence – cannot be easily answered, given the many transformations of the AOF after World War II. Additionally, with respect to the mobility of people in administration and politics at the time, Charles concludes that by 1954, just four years before the country’s independence, Guinean colonial politics had been delocalized and ‘gravitated’ around the centres of Conakry, Dakar and Paris (Charles 1997: 103–104). Th e movement of Guinean politicians, traders and other professionals within West Africa and beyond did not stop with independence. In fact, during the so-called First Republic (1958–84) Guinea experienced several waves of emigration caused by the lack of economic prospects and political suppression that sometimes assumed an ethnic character, particularly targeting members of the demographically largest ethnic group, the FulBe, called Peul in Guinea.3 From this period a network of Guineans emerged across West Africa and beyond, held together by shared experiences and sometimes engaging in oppositional politics, such as founding political parties – a forbidden activity in Guinea at that time. Th e government publicly shunned emigrants and offi cially limited their rights to political participation. Extended family networks were maintained, however, enabling Guineans at home to profi t from the earnings of those living abroad. Kaba (1977: 40) suggests that in the 1970s, basic medical services that typically were available only abroad were domestically aff ordable only to those Guineans who had fi nancial connections to migrant family members. Th us, economic ties and political engagement between home and abroad are by no means a new phenomenon. However, new technologies of travel and communication have considerably intensifi ed and strengthened the ties between Guineans living in the country and the ressortissants. Th e ressortissants Guinéens are a very heterogeneous group. Some of them have their roots in political exile: they or their parents were forced to leave the country due following political prosecution during the First Republic under Guinea’s fi rst post-independence government. In later years, during the Second Contested Transnational Spaces 81

Republic (1984–2008), economic (and educational) reasons seem to have been what motivated many Guineans to move abroad even as some of the earlier ex- iles were returning. Most recently, economic hardship and the search for greater sociopolitical stability have pushed many to emigrate. Th ese are people from heterogeneous backgrounds, with or without formal education, substantial capital or international (family) connections.4 Taken together, Guineans abroad do not represent a coherent group from any perspective. Some stay in touch with their family and friends in Guinea and can aff ord to provide a certain level of economic support. Some take an active interest in politics and even become engaged in political parties that have functioning chapters abroad. Th ough the latter are certainly not the largest group of Guineans abroad, their activities become highly visible in various media outlets, as will be discussed here. Many studies of migrants establishing transnational communities foreground the intricate role these communities can play in local, regional or international politics, usually framing migrants’ ties to their countries of origin in a political context in the form of motivation for migration, questions of legal status in the host country and so on. Th ese migrants can become further politicized in times of crisis and prompt a new engagement with the country as a whole, the national government or other migrants of the same origin. Opposition to politics in the home country may prompt such revived political engagement. Indeed, oppressive practices of governance can create an atmosphere that allows dissenting parties to thrive abroad, as members of the transnational community fundraise and organize public events to initiate political communication with counterparts in the sending country. Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004: 1026) argue that it is migrants’ experiences with multiple legal and political cultures that frame their points of reference and result in demands for political or legal changes in their countries of origin, thus giving the impression that their engagement is usually critical of, if not overtly oppositional to, the government in place. Studies by Guarnizo, Portes and Haller (2003), Ong (1996) and M. Smith (1994) indicate that migrants’ political engagement, whether directed at host governments or at their countries of origin, is very heterogeneous and not necessarily counterhegemonic or oppositional. Strong supporters of the home government can be found among politically active segments of the transnational community. In 2006/07, both the major opposition parties of Guinea and the then ruling Parti de l’Unité et du Progrès had party chapters in cities abroad that hosted large groups of Guinean ressortissants. Because of their great diversity, their political engagements require context-specifi c examination. Th e discussion of such political engagements presupposes that these activities are recognized by the government and the local populations, and appreciated or contested from a position of political (party) convictions. In Guinea, popular knowledge has it that about one third of the country’s population emigrated during the First Republic. After the death of Sékou Touré 82 Anita Schroven in 1984, the new government under President Lansana Conté – realizing the potential that lay in the migrant community – urged Guineans to return and help rebuild the country (Bah, Keita and Lootvoet 1989). While it is unclear how many Guineans emigrated where, or when they returned, the successive governments in Conakry were and are interested in integrating them into ‘national development eff orts’. Th e constitution of 1992, which is still in eff ect, stipulates that Guinean nationals living abroad have the right to participate in national elections and should be represented in parliament. However, it off ers no specifi cations on how this direct representation should take place. Th e future constitution, in preparation since 2010, intends to clarify this issue, potentially granting the transnational community a fi xed number of parliamentary seats by direct vote. In this specifi c context it becomes evident that domestic sociopolitical conditions aff ect how governments deal with members of ‘their’ transnational community. Although parliamentary representation could be ensured in several ways, the direct election of a fi xed number of candidates by all Guineans living abroad could lead to fears that certain particularly politically active subgroups of the transnational community have inadvertently been granted preference. Th e comparatively high number of ethnic Peul in Guinea’s transnational community is an implicit argument against such reserved seats in parliament. Some members of this group recall experiences of political exile resulting from prosecution from the First Republic onwards. Th is group is well organized, compared to other associations (ethnic and non-ethnic) of Guineans abroad. Its mobilization with regard to political parties and fundraising is also comparatively strong.5 Th us, a direct voting procedure for reserved parliamentary seats could give additional weight to those political parties that draw on ethnic (i.e. Peul) electoral support. Th is issue touches on popular fears in Guinea that the Peul could gain political power, something populist voices abusing ethnic stereotypes raise as a threat to all other ethnic groups in Guinea. Th e confl icts surrounding elections from the 1990s up to the latest parliamentary elections in 2013 reveal both the devastating consequences that can result from ethnicization of politics, and the way these tensions are quickly mirrored in Guinea’s transnational community. Members of this community have in fact expressed doubts that direct representation could be enacted. Th e political considerations concerning the electoral rights of the Guinean transnational community do not end with negotiations between that community and the ‘home’ government, for the local population is involved in the discussion as well. Studies on transnational communities do not often address whether local people accept emigrants as relevant partners in political discourse and then grant the necessary space for them to voice their opinions. Gerharz (2010: 161–62) points out that negotiations between groups of ‘migrants’ and ‘locals’ are essential to both parties because they redraw the boundaries between local and transnational spaces, similar to the way identities are mutually negotiated in these Contested Transnational Spaces 83 encounters. Power relations between the groups remain complicated. Due to the resourcefulness of some members of the transnational communities, their engagement in the evolving relations within the transnational community may appear to dominate the expression of a country’s public life or a particular political debate – the ‘transnational public space’. In some cases, this space itself becomes the object of contestation between transnational and local groups negotiating politics (Itzigsohn and Saucedo 2002: 769). Th is essay examines the negotiations of transnational public space using the example of Guineans debating political rights and duties of the ressortissants. Th e debate focused on whether migrants did indeed deserve the political space they were demanding for themselves, and whether they were entitled to voice a political opinion when only the local population experienced the oppression by the government – in other words, whether emigrants possessed the necessary political citizenship to have a say.

Guinean Politics Debated Between Local and Transnational Communities In the highly fl uid political situation of Guinea in 2006 and 2007, strikes against the national government occurred repeatedly. Popular call-in shows on international radio stations such as RFI (Radio France International) and the BBC (Brit- ish Broadcasting Corporation) drew wide attention. Internet access was largely confi ned to the largest cities, so radio was sometimes the only source of information, particularly in rural areas – especially after the government inhibited the dispensation of mobile phone top-up cards and later disabled text messaging as well.6 Fuel shortages kept the generators that supplied electricity to mobile phone antennas from being recharged, further limiting the already patchy mobile phone coverage in rural Guinea. Th e few private radio stations were forced to close down or limit their operations, while the public radio station RTG (Radio Télévision Guinéen) broadcast traditional music and heavily censored news. In this situation, international radio stations were instrumental, granting airtime for news on current events and allowing callers to debate the way out of the political deadlock. Many of the contributors identifi ed themselves as Guineans calling from West African capitals, Europe or North America. Th ey often called upon the local population to act: to strike longer and more effi ciently, and to make certain demands of the government, labour unions and other national leaders. In the local arena of Forécariah, much debate surrounded the personal background, Guinean town of origin, and family ties of these callers. Ethnicity played a part, but the speculation revolved primarily around extended family ties. ‘Don’t you have a cousin who is in [name of city]?’ was an oft-heard remark after the popular RFI discussion programme Appel sur l’actualité. As many fi rst and family names closely resemble one another, this question was quite common; one invari- 84 Anita Schroven ably knew that one’s interlocutor indeed had a relative of that name somewhere abroad. While the tone may have sounded accusatory, the enquiry was chiefl y intended to validate an unknown caller’s identity as a fellow Guinean before assessing the signifi cance of the opinion voiced. In this Guinean debate, the political fi gure of the ‘stranger’ is closely inter- linked with the attempt to familiarize this fi gure and integrate him or her into personalized networks. In diff erent periods of the country’s past, foreigners were stylized as potential threats to the country who sought to disrupt the population’s unity in order to weaken the country and make it more vulnerable to outside intervention. Th is public attitude may have begun before 1958, when the colonial administration tried to manipulate elections to limit the independence drive, or with independence, when the departing French colonial administration was accused of destroying infrastructure with the intention of hampering the new country’s evolution (Rivière 1977; Diallo 1990; Straker 2007). Former Presi- dents Sékou Touré and Lansana Conté both utilized this image of the suspicious foreigner in contexts of regional instability to impress upon the population the necessity to stand united as Guineans. In early 2007, rumours spread that Libe- rian ex-rebels had reached the capital along with mercenaries from neighbouring Guinea-Bissau. Th ese well-known spectres of the invading stranger built upon actual past threats and sought to connect them to the present (Kaba 1978; Ko- bélé Kéita 2002; McGovern 2002; Arieff and McGovern 2013). Beyond a call for national unity, identifying a foreign scapegoat implied that the current threat was not made by the ideal Guinean citizens, who were implicitly peaceful, law- abiding people faithfully supporting their government in trying times. In the generally tense political atmosphere of late 2006 and early 2007, it was therefore important to establish that the speaker was not in fact a stranger aiming to sow dissension but rather a Guinean voicing a genuinely felt opinion. Th e idea of a distant cousin being potentially able to verify the identity of the caller from outside the country was a common and reassuring rhetorical move – and a typical practice with regard to newcomers from anywhere within Guinea as well. Once this symbolic familiarity had been established, the opinion voiced by the caller could be heard as valid – in the sense of ‘He has the right to say that’7 – even if the local discussants did not agree with the opinion and perhaps suspected that the caller had a specifi c political party affi liation or personal tie to a well-known political fi gure. Whatever the case, the callers’ demands for space in the tense political arena of Guinea were granted, at fi rst. Referring to other people’s political views rather than expressing controversial opinions oneself, breaking with the usual public ‘culture of silence and guarded- ness’ (Dave 2014: 2), could also represent a rhetorical move for self-preservation. In Guinea’s not-so-distant past, particularly during the First Republic, expressing controversial political opinions could be dangerous in certain circumstances. People remember it as a time when Contested Transnational Spaces 85

one could not talk. Everyone could be a spy, your neighbour, even your family could report you had said something against the government, then you were in real trouble. Even your life could be in danger. Here in Forécariah everyone has family members who disappeared during that time. (Forécariah, November 2006)

With this historical experience in mind, it is understandable that people preferred to discuss politics using other people’s words, quoting radio comments to voice opinions and to participate in discussions. Th is strategy served as protection: should government agents enquire later, no one could be pressed to own up to a particular opinion.

Demand for Transnational Action Th e perception of opinions coming from abroad, propagated by way of the media, changed over time in Forécariah. With the concurrent breakdown of political negotiations in the capital and rising cost of food staples, local commentators’ attitudes towards members of the Guinean transnational community changed, aff ecting the communication space that they shared. To understand the circumstances that led to this change, it is necessary to consider what was happening in Guinea. Th e military had cracked down on protesting trade unions and other critical voices that had united under a loose civil society umbrella, often referred to in Guinea as forces vives, in June and December 2006. Th e negotiations – that is, the limited negotiations that had been allowed at all – had not eff ectively improved living conditions, curbed the climbing infl ation or halted the high-level embezzlement of the country’s resources by the president’s entourage.8 Demon- strations and negotiations had failed to yield results. Th us, local commentators called upon the Guinean transnational community9 to function as ambassadors for the local population and organize protest marches to impress upon powerful actors, such as the United Nations and the governments of the United States and France, the extent of political repression and economic suff ering in their home country. Th e news of the demonstrations that resulted in front of key embassies in Washington, Brussels and Paris was well received in Forécariah, despite the challenges to gaining access to news at all. Private Guinean Internet sites documented images and speeches from the protest marches, and when private radio was rein- stated some of these reports were read out – again, closely listened to and accompanied by speculations as to who might have been there and what kinds of details this friend or that relative could have reported had there been a mobile phone connection at the given time. Th ese websites preserved the ‘transnational public’ that had been created for later perusal and refl ection by people who did not have access to the information during the period of strikes.10 86 Anita Schroven

In such a situation, the politically active Guinean communities abroad came to be perceived as the acting arm of a people whose majority could not engage in protests themselves. Locally, this was sometimes framed as ‘the ressortissants’ duty’:

Th ey have to help us, they owe us that much. We look after their properties here, after their old parents. We welcome them and host them when they come to visit. Now it is their task as Guineans to help us! (Foré- cariah, January 2007)11

Comments such as this were based on the argument of shared citizenship. At certain moments transnational and local populations shared tasks, such as building of houses and then keeping them up, caring for older family members, performing rituals and holding religious festivals, and fi nancing school or medical bills. In this way they remained closely bound as members of the same extended community. In other words, this sharing of tasks and benefi ts may initially have been based on family ties, but it eff ectively became a community occupation, particularly on the local side. Th e above quote frames the sharing of tasks within the context of shared citizenship: all of the addressed are being united by the fact that they are Guin- ean citizens engaged in the political evolution of the country. Belonging to this community of people was automatically associated with shared obligations. Peo- ple within the country were looking for a way to connect to the outside as the domestic situation grew desperate; hence, outside support was sought. Whereas the optimal projected result of the emigrants’ demonstrations was action taken by foreign governments that would directly intervene on behalf of the powerless population in Guinea itself, in the meantime the transnational community was an audience that listened and commiserated, providing at least a sense of relief and security. Such an attentive audience outside of Guinea also meant that the government and security forces could not pursue a policy of violence with impunity but would have to answer at some point. Such ideas and reassurances became a kind of solace in Forécariah. Th e transnational community, conceptualized as a homogenous whole by the local audience, was unable to share the experience of those in Forécariah directly yet remained an integral part of the process, and the resultant bond was not a matter of belonging to a particular extended family or ethnic group but rather that they were all Guineans.

Denying Political Space Th e situation changed no less than a few weeks later. In February 2007 the military had violently squashed more demonstrations in the larger cities, and as negotiations for a change of government were haltingly under way in Conakry, callers Contested Transnational Spaces 87 from abroad received a cooler welcome. Even when callers’ Guinean descent or nationality was not necessarily doubted, their entitlement to (publicly) voice an opinion was questioned. Th e callers often urged the local population to present demands to the political leaders so as to ‘improve negotiations’ regarding governmental changes and achieve a ‘true democratic turn’ in the country. One of their main arguments is summarized in this message from a U.S.-based caller to RFI:

It is now that pressure must be applied, it is now that people have to risk everything and maybe even strike again and lose their lives – otherwise our children will not live in a better country.

Th is and similar opinions voiced by Guineans calling from abroad stirred many responses among the population of Forécariah. While the possibility hung in the air that the current negotiations would fail, just as they had in 2006, and with new rounds of demonstrations being cautiously considered locally, hearing such demands from abroad aroused loud and emotional reactions. Replies came in many forms:

Let him speak, he is far away [in Philadelphia], he does not matter! (Forécariah, February 2007)

It is not him who will be shot; it is not his children who have died in January [2007]. He has no idea what he is talking about! (Ibid.)

Our children? His children are safe, well-fed, healthy, going to good schools, they have a future. Th ey have nothing in common with our children here who are dying every day of diarrhoea or malaria. We are not the same; he has no right to make demands like that! (Ibid.)

Th rough such reactions, local discussants negated the political space that callers had demanded for themselves. Th eir entitlement to contribute to the debate of the future Guinea was revoked on the grounds that they did not share the same everyday concerns of the local population. Th e shared experience of (personal and collective) suff ering constitutes an important part of the Guinean national consciousness (Kohl and Schroven 2014). It draws on memories of the colonial experience, strongly infl uenced by the redefi nition of that period as promoted by the anti-imperial ideology of the First Republic. Today, the period of the First Republic itself has been redefi ned as a period of suff ering under an authoritarian regime and failing economic system. Yet this period is not simply dismissed summarily due to the negative experiences; rather, it is also lauded as one that lastingly shaped the people in Guinea into a nation and made them modern citizens. According to popular observations, the 88 Anita Schroven

Guinean level of national identifi cation surpasses that of neighbouring countries, where ethnicity remains more important in everyday life than national belonging (Rivière 1977, 1978; Straker 2008). Even against the background of an acknowledged diffi cult past, Guineans take great pride in this pervasive national awareness and present it as one reason why the country has not experienced civil war, though many of its neighbours have.12 Today, the shared experience of suff ering under a (distant centralized) government – in both the past and present – forms a key part of being Guinean and therefore excludes those migrants who do not share this experience in their current lives.

Contesting the Political Rights of Guineans Abroad Th e local population’s increasing reluctance to liberally grant political space to the ressortissants became even more pronounced in mid 2007 when the political parties resumed activities, prompted by the successive installation of new prime ministers and promised preparations for long-overdue parliamentary elections. Many parties held meetings for members and even political rallies, asserting their intentions for the upcoming elections. Th ese activities took place outside of Guinea. Many local commentators criticized the party leaders for paying more attention to the electorate abroad than to the ‘real Guineans’ who lived in the country:

It’s the money, they [opposition party leaders] know that they get their money from the ressortissants, so they are going shopping [fait la course, collecting campaign contributions] now, even before the real election- run begins. (Forécariah, July 2007)

Other local commentators were more pointedly critical of the fact that many party leaders and politicians had spent considerable time abroad, either in actual political exile or as a cautious move in light of the unpredictability of the government:

It’s the same all over again. When in 1993 [legislative] elections were coming, politicians turned up from all over Europe, from the U.S. Th ey never even lived here for decades. Th ey had no idea what life was about here. … Th ey stirred up things, and when at the demonstrations people were shot, they were far away … running to the airport and oﬀ to their big villas in Europe. (Ibid.)

Another chimed in:

Let them just do their thing now in Conakry. Th is politics business is for rich people from abroad, it serves the interests of the people abroad, not of real Guineans. (Ibid.) Contested Transnational Spaces 89

Whereas people in Forécariah often construed national politics as a distant aff air for ‘politicians’ in the capital (Schroven 2010: 137 ff .), in this case it was depicted as the provenance of the Guineans living abroad. Many opposition leaders were closely associated or even equated with the ressortissants, as they and their immediate family spent signifi cant parts of their lives abroad, accumulating considerable wealth and fi tting the general image of successful migrants. Th ey were portrayed as visiting home occasionally, demonstrating their success abroad with conspicuous displays of wealth in the face of a poor population and demanding gratitude or allegiance in return for small gifts, without much consideration of the lives the local people were leading. ‘Th ey lack respect for the family! As Guin- eans they should know better’, was an often-heard summary of the behaviour of such visitors. In mid 2007, commentators in Forécariah argued that Guinea’s political space, where the ressortissants were very much present, was a space that the common people in Guinea did not share. Th ey conceptualized the ressortissants as taking part in an elite discourse of ‘politicians’ – a term popularly used to describe easily corruptible, politically unrooted opportunists without links to the lives of ordinary Guineans. Th e transnational space that had been shared by the politically active ressortissants and the local population at the beginning of 2007 was now separate spaces – to the perceived disadvantage of the local population. Th ey now saw the migrants as intruders usurping a political space that seemed to have opened up briefl y to participation after the national strikes and was very precious after nearly fi fty years of authoritarian rule. As a consequence, the popular mood turned against the party leaders and their entourages from abroad, as well as against ressortissants’ general claims of participating in a shared political space. Politics now happened not only far away in Conakry, but even farther away in emigration centres abroad. In the eyes of local commentators, shared nationality – with its ‘constituents’ of collective ancestry and history, and the mutual feeling of belonging and striv- ing towards a joint future – was thus not enough to link these groups of people separated by physical distance. Th e crucial missing ingredient was the struggles of everyday life that the ressortissants did not share. Full political citizenship for the ressortissants, in the sense of the possibility of participating in Guinean politics, was at the least questioned, if not denied, by the local commentators.

Conclusions: Who Is a Guinean Citizen? Th e accusation contained in the opening quote – ‘Th ey are not Guineans!’ – originates from a debate about ressortissants’ right to participate in Guinean politics during a phase of both great hope and great insecurity concerning the country’s future. It reveals a particular notion of citizenship that goes beyond the mere demand for shared origin or nationality. According to this notion, the rights to 90 Anita Schroven vote for presidents or parliament and to make political demands of the Guinean people are linked to the experience of shared suff ering. Th us, such rights are not simply granted by one’s Guinean nationality. Th e lack of participation in everyday life in Guinea with all of its attendant socioeconomic hardships and political insecurity thus invalidated any claims Guinean emigrants made to legit- imately enter into political debates following the 2007 strikes – at least from the perspective of the local population. While the ressortissants demanded space on a national level, at the local level they were deemed unqualifi ed to participate in decision-making processes for the future because they lacked experience of everyday life. Th e pervasive visibility of the transnational public space, which by mid 2007 was dominated by (opposition) party politics and ‘their’ politicians, limited the space the local population was willing to grant the ressortissants. In Forécariah, the ressortissants’ visibility suggested to the local population that they would not have political space for themselves in a future Guinea. Th is stands in contrast to an earlier phase of the ongoing debate, when Guin- eans living abroad had been envisioned as spokespersons or ambassadors of the local population. In that inclusive phase, the idea of solidarity was invoked based on an implicit agreement to share tasks and responsibilities between the ressortissants and local Guineans. Exchanges between the two groups were not always harmonious, but the local population emphasized common belonging, shared interests and mutual responsibilities to justify the demands they placed on emigrants, who in turn were expected to send remittances, participate in community life even from abroad and assist in situations of need – such those resulting from suppression and violence experienced at the hands of government forces. Th is particular notion of solidarity eventually gave rise to criticism of the ressortissants, who, it was said, had not complied with the expectations placed upon them. Furthermore, the emigrants’ demands – voiced over the radio – for more demonstrations in Guinean cities, more pressure to be exerted on the government and therefore more sacrifi ces to be endured by the local population were met with dismay by the local audience in Forécariah. At that moment the diff erences between the two groups came to the fore – so much so that the local population even began to question the ressortissants’ right to their Guinean citizenship. Th e varying emphases of the above debate are part of wider negotiations about the public space that emigrants are to be granted. From a local perspective, the recognition that ressortissants receive from the government and political leaders is undeservedly dominant in the debate and thus needs to be challenged. More generally, however, the question arises as to how local populations perceive a politically active emigrant population and what space they wish to grant it under changing conditions within the shared home country. Nationality and citizenship form a basic part of the local debate. Th roughout the period discussed in this chapter, people in Forécariah did not necessarily specifi cally question the nationality of the ressortissants, but they did question the po- Contested Transnational Spaces 91 litical space the ressortissants were occupying – as citizens actively engaged in the debating and decision-making of Guinean politics. From the local perspective, even though a common past and heritage amounted to a common nationality, emigrants’ nonparticipation in the everyday struggles within Guinea disqualifi ed them from political citizenship.

Anita Schroven is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social An- thropology, Halle (Saale), where she received her PhD. She has worked at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, University of Bielefeld, Germany. She received the 2006 young scholar’s prize of the African Studies Association in Germany, a fellowship at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, and the Institut Pasteur, France. She received the 2006 young scholar’s prize of the Afri- can Studies Association in Germany. Her publications include Women after War: Gender Mainstreaming and Social Construction of Identity in Contemporary Sierra Leone (Lit, 2006) and ‘Th e People, the Power and the Public Service: Political Identiﬁ cation during Guinea’s General Strikes in 2007’, in Development and Change (Wiley, 2010).

Notes 1. Ethnographic fi eldwork in Guinea was conducted between April 2006 and July 2007 in the context of the project ‘Local Authorities and Oral History in Processes of Confl ict and Integration in Guinea’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale). I thank the conference participants, the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive engagement and valuable comments on previous drafts. 2. Initially popular suff rage was not practised, but village and canton chiefs, war veterans and high-ranking clerks were among those who formed the core group that expanded over time to include other groups of people. Only with the passage of the Loi Cadre of 1956 was popular suff rage (extended to all adults, regardless of status, employment or sex) formally achieved (de Benoist 1982). 3. Th e so-called Complot Peul with its violent aftermath in 1976 is one example of the political targeting of ethnic Peul during the First Republic (Sow 1989; Groelsema 1998). When multiparty elections fi rst took place in the 1990s, Peul leaders demanded repa- rations and equal opportunities in the political and administrative arenas (Groelsema 1998). 4. Yaguine Koita and Fodé Tounkara, two Guinean youths who froze to death while travelling clandestinely on a Europe-bound plane, have become symbols for the youth, predominantly male, who try to make their fortune abroad. 5. Th e Guinean migration and transnational community has not yet been researched. Th e above considerations are based on personal communications with Guinean migrants living in Germany, Belgium and the United States. 6. In the context of limited funds and the restricted availability of top-up phone credit, (bulk) text messaging was a convenient way to share information and mobilize politically. Disabling this means of communication forced people to make phone calls, which were signifi cantly more expensive and reached a much smaller audience. With one state-owned 92 Anita Schroven

phone company (SOTELGUI) and a single commercial competitor at the time, the government was able to eff ectively manipulate mobile phone communication and curb already fragile Internet capacities in January 2007. 7. Most commonly, both callers and commentators were male. Women discuss their political opinions, but usually in a setting more private than street-side bars or neighbourhood courtyards. 8. For more details of the events see ICG (2008) and McGovern (2007). 9. For the sake of the current argument and in order to emphasize the locally perceived diff erences, I follow the emic nomenclature of grouping Guineans abroad together into a single entity, the ressortissants. 10. Th roughout January and much of February 2007 the very limited Internet infrastructure in Guinea was further curbed by the government-ordered shutdown of Internet cafés. Private or offi ce Internet access – very limited to begin with – was blocked in February 2007, when martial law was declared for two weeks (IFEX 2007). 11. Th e following excerpts originate from conversations with established interlocutors and from conversations in the semipublic setting of a roadside café frequented daily by a fairly closed circle of male customers. 12. One might argue that in Mali and Senegal, long-lasting confl icts with internal rebellions and secessionist movements did not constitute civil war. However, many Guineans see these events as evidence of failed nation-building processes.

References Appadurai, A. 1991. ‘Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries from a Transnational Anthro- pology’, in R.G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 191–210. Arieﬀ , A., and M. McGovern. 2013. ‘“History Is Stubborn”: Talk about Truth, Justice, and National Reconciliation in the Republic of Guinea’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 55(1): 198–225. Bah, A.O., B. Keita and B. Lootvoet. 1989. ‘Les Guinéens de l‘extérieur: rentrer au pays?’, Politique Africaine 36(4): 22–37. Bauböck, R. 2003. ‘Towards a Political Th eory of Migrant Transnationalism’, International Migration Review 37: 700–23. Brubaker, R. 2005. ‘Th e “Diaspora” Diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 28: 1–19. Chafer, T. 2002. Th e End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? Oxford: Berg. Charles, B. 1997. ‘La transformation des relations de pouvoir entre le gouvernement général, le Ministère de la France d’Outre Mer et la Guinée (1956-1958)’, in C. Becker, S. Mbaye and I. Th ioub (eds), AOF: Réalités et héritages. Sociétés ouest-africaines et ordre colonial, 1895–1960. Dakar: Direction des Archives du Sénégal, pp. 101–14. Dave, N. 2014. ‘Th e Politics of Silence: Music, Violence and Protest in Guinea’,Ethnomusi- cology 58(1): 1–29. de Benoist, J.R. 1982. L’Afrique Occidentale Francaise de 1944 à 1960. Dakar: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines. Diallo, G.P. 1990. Th e Philosophy of Ahmed Sékou Touré and Its Impact on the Development of the Republic of Guinea: 1958–1971. New York: City University of New York. Faist, T. 2000. Th e Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Spaces. New York: Oxford University Press. Contested Transnational Spaces 93

Gerharz, E. 2010. ‘When Migrants Travel Back Home: Changing Identities in Northern Sri Lanka after the Ceasefi re of 2002’, Mobilities 5: 147–65. Groelsema, R.J. 1998. ‘Th e Dialectics of Citizenship and Ethnicity in Guinea’, Africa Today 45: 411–23. Guarnizo, L.E., A. Portes and W. Haller. 2003. ‘Assimilation and Transnationalism: Determi- nants of Transnational Political Action Among Contemporary Migrants’, American Jour- nal of Sociology 108: 1211–48. Hoehne, M.V., D. Geyissa, M. Abdile and C. Schmitz-Pranghe. 2010. ‘Diff erentiating the Di- aspora: Refl ections on Diasporic Engagement “for Peace” in the Horn of Africa’, Diaspeace Working Paper and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Paper no. 124. ICG. 2008. Guinée: garantir la poursuite des réformes démocratiques. Brussels: International Crisis Group. IFEX. 2007. Guinea: Martial Law Imposes Information Blackout. Toronto: International Free- dom of Expression Exchange. Itzigsohn, J. 2000. ‘Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenship: Th e Institutions of Immi- grants’ Political Transnationalism’, International Migration Review 34: 1126–54. Itzigsohn, J., and S.G. Saucedo. 2002. ‘Immigrant Incorporation and Sociocultural Transna- tionalism’, International Migration Review 36: 766–98. Kaba, L. 1977. ‘Guinean Politics: A Critical Historical Overview’, Th e Journal of Modern Af- rican Studies 15: 25–45. ———. 1978. ‘Rhetoric and Reality in Conakry’, Africa Report 23: 43–47. Kobélé Kéita, S. 2002. Des complots contre la Guinée de Sékou Touré (1858–1984). Conakry: Soguidip. Kohl, C., and A. Schroven. 2014. ‘Suff ering for the Nation: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Con- ceptualisations of the Nation in Guinea and Guinea-Bissau’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Paper no. 152. Levitt, P., and N. Glick Schiller. 2004. ‘Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society’, International Migration Review 38: 1002–39. McGovern, M. 2002. ‘Confl it régional et rhétorique de la contreinsurrection. Guinéens et réfugiés en Septembre 2000’, Politique Africaine 88(4): 84–102. ———. 2007. ‘Janvier 2007 – Sékou Touré est Mort’, Politique Africaine 107(3): 125–45. Ong, A. 1996. ‘Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and of Capitalism’, in A. Ong and D. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: Th e Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transna- tionalism. New York: Routledge, pp. 171–203. ———. 2003. ‘Cyberpublics and Diaspora Politics Among Transnational Chinese’, Interven- tions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5: 82–100. Portes, A. 1996. ‘Transnational Communities: Th eir Emergence and Signifi cance in the Con- temporary World System’, in R.P. Korzeniewicz and W.C. Smith (eds), Latin America in the World Economy. Westport: Greenwood Press, pp. 151–68. Prikkalainen, P., and M. Abdile. 2009. ‘Th e Diaspora-Confl ict-Peace-Nexus: A Literature Re- view’, Diaspeace Working Paper 1. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Rivière, C. 1977. Guinea: Th e Mobilisation of a People. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ———. 1978. Classes et stratifi cations sociales en Afrique. Le cas Guinéen. Paris: Presses Univer- sitaires de France. Schlee, G., and I. Schlee. 2012. ‘Ghanaische und Somali-Migranten in Europa – Ein Vergleich zweier Diasporen’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 137: 1–22. Schmidt, E. 2005. Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Move- ment in Guinea, 1939–1958. Portsmouth: Heinemann. 94 Anita Schroven

Schroven, A. 2010. ‘Integration Th rough Marginality: Local Politics and Oral Tradition in Guinea’, Ph.D. thesis. Halle (Saale): Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Sheﬀ er, G. 2003. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, M.P. 1994. ‘Can you Imagine? Transnational Migration and the Globalization of Grassroots Politics’, Social Text 39: 15–33. Smith, M.P., and L.E. Guarnizo (eds). 1998. Transnationalism from Below: Comparative Urban and Community Research, vol. 6. New Brunswick: Transaction. Smith, R.C. 2003. ‘Diasporic Memberships in Historical Perspective: Comparative Insights from the Mexican, Italian, and Polish Cases’, International Migration Review 37: 724–59. Sow, A.M. 1989. ‘Conﬂ its ethniques dans un état révolutionaire. Le cas Guinéen’, in J.P. Chré- tien and G. Pruniers (eds), Les ethnies ont une histoire, hommes et sociétés. Paris: Karthala, pp. 387–405. Straker, J. 2007. ‘Stories of “Militant Th eatre” in the Guinean Forest: “Demystifying” the Mo- tives and Moralities of a Revolutionary Nation-State’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 19: 207–33. ———. 2008. ‘Th e State of the Subject: a Guinean Educator’s Odyssey in the Postcolonial Forest, 1960–2001’, Th e Journal of African History 49: 93–109. Wang, G. 1993. ‘Greater China and the Chinese Overseas’, Th e China Quarterly 136: 926–48. Chapter 5 Identity Beyond ID Diaspora within the Nation Markus Rudolf

‘You cannot have two ID cards, you know’, Daouda explains.1 Sitting on the porch of one of the numerous mud-built tin-roofed houses on the periphery of the city of Ziguinchor, in Casamance, southern Senegal, he has come from Gam- bia to participate in a funeral in his native town in Bandial, an hour’s drive from the regional capital. He shows his Gambian ID card. It is new and fancy, looks like a debit card, and has a built-in chip. Th e card states: ‘Born in Serrekunda, Gambian national.’ Asked whether he is a national only of Gambia – the nation in which he lives – or also of Senegal – the nation in which he was born – he replies: ‘Th ey will think you are a criminal if they catch you with two ID cards’. Confronted with the fact that nevertheless numerous people hold both nationalities, he clariﬁ es: ‘You have to keep them [the IDs] apart’. Daouda left his home village in the heart of the Casamance as a young man. Illnesses had plagued him for too long: ‘You know in the village there is a lot of witchcraft’, he explains, ‘so I followed a friend who had been to Gambia and I stayed’. Asked how he had obtained Gambian nationality and, moreover, why his birthplace had been changed to a Gambian town, he said: ‘You know that is how it is done’, adding: ‘But they ask you a lot of questions. Th ey want to know everything now. A lot of questions. It is not easy’.2 Daouda stays overnight at his sister’s place before he goes to the ceremony the next day. He explains that he almost always comes for funerals, rarely for occasions such as weddings or other life-cycle festivities. Th e ancestors are important, he points out. But apart from that, his life seems to be in Gambia. When visited in Gambia he seems to be well integrated there. His children do not speak French; he does not have parallel households. None of his children are sent away to attend school, work or live in Senegal. Th is level of integration is nevertheless not the rule in the region. Many people are frontier runners: cases abound where individuals cross borders whenever a better opportunity emerges on the other side. In this case, opportunities refer to such things as better prices for consumer goods, a more developed public infrastructure, more plentiful job opportunities and so on (cf. Højbjerg et al. 2012).3 96 Markus Rudolf

Diasporas or Autochthons? How much is the cohesion and functionality of a nation-state aff ected by dif- ferent individual trajectories, such as Daouda’s described above? In other words, regarding whether people commit themselves to one nationality rather than remain frontier runners with multiple national identities,4 what diff erence do their choices make with respect to nation-building? According to Fox and Miller- Idriss (2008), the fact that people have to be made national to make the nation’ has been somehow neglected. It is interesting to examine how the identifi cation marker of nationality has come to overrule all others at the actor’s level. How did this marker become so important that people have sacrifi ced their lives for it? And what role does the distinctive feature of European nation-building play in the making of those models? Examining the less successful examples of nation- building and describing exceptions to the rules can produce a detailed explanation of the actual set of rules. Th e issue of national integration is truly mirrored by alienated, exiled, discriminated groups. To ask why and how these excluded groups retain loyalties and networks beyond the prioritized national identifi cation sheds light on the question of national integration in general. Th is chapter asks whether ‘diaspora’5 can be used, beyond the classic understanding of the term, as an analytical concept to isolate transnational markers of national integration. It furthermore argues that a study of diaspora groups reveals the qualities of national identifi cation and the distinctive features of the we-group’s majority that are necessary assets to be integrated. To test this idea, this essay compares the integration of one regional group in diff erent locations. Th ese locations stretch from what is usually understood as a typical immigrant diaspora destination, that is, overseas somewhere, to what is considered a classical homeland – the birthplace of its natives everywhere. Th e case of interest is the Casamançais, those people originating from the Casamance.6 Among other places they are found in other parts of Senegal, in Gambia and in France. Th e fi ndings indicate that transcending the nation-state framework of classical diaspora studies can help to better understand characteristic features of nation-building in Senegal and elsewhere: looking at the subjects who are excluded makes clearly evident which national subjects are integrated into the nation and how. Before using the term diaspora as a tool of analysis it helps to diff erentiate three contexts of meaning. First, diaspora is used to identify and describe a certain transnational group diff erent from the current national majority within the nation-state. Second, it is used as a category of self-description and belonging that transcends time and space for certain individuals. In both of these cases diaspora ascribes special characteristics to a group. Th ird, there is the analytical use of the term, which diff erentiates it from the everyday uses above. Th is analytical meaning can be delineated by considering the historical origin of the term and then isolating and making explicit its constitutive features and comparing them Identity Beyond ID 97 in various contexts to determine what makes a group a diaspora in one place and not in another. In short, this means the term can be used as an analytical category, regardless of its self-ascribed and ascribed uses in diff erent national contexts. Consequently this essay is not about groups that are referred to generally as comprising a diaspora, but about the integration and exclusion of groups that are analytically diff erentiated as diasporas.

Nation-State Role Models Could Daouda, the Bandial native introduced above, be labelled as an example of a diasporic individual? Certain typical features are evident. An international border separates Gambia from Senegal. Th e Senegalese living in Gambia are therefore part of an immigrant group, and the Casamançais are Senegalese citizens as well. Yet the quality of integration for Casamançais in Gambia diﬀ ers from other groups of immigrants. Th is might seem natural in frontier areas – where, for example, immigration from Senegal to Gambia can mean going no farther than next door to stay with your neighbour, as many villages are indeed divided by the border. But also in the Gambian capital and the entire Banjul-Serrekunda region, Casamançais are mostly well integrated, or at least more integrated than other groups, and are never explicitly labelled as a diaspora. A possible explanation might be that the Casamançais are not a category involved in the struggle for primacy in Gambia. Th e autocratic president of Gambia is a Diola. In public discourse (manifest in everyday discrimination practice) Gambia remains a Mande country. Th e Diola and Mande are also autochthons in the Casamance.7 Other groups, such as the Wolof from Senegal and the Peul from the Fouta Djallon, are not considered autochthons.8 Ousmane, a Peul whose father came from the Fouta Djallon on foot in colonial times, explains:

Th e police control the fair-skinned ones. Th ey just control them [and nobody else]. When a policeman asked me to step out of the bus, I told him – ‘Why? Because of my skin colour? I am a Gambian like you. I was born here.’ Th ey are stupid. It is always the same.

He complains that people are discriminated against because they are considered to have come from somewhere other than the immediate vicinity of Gambia (Casamance in the south and Sine Saloum in the north). ‘My brother Yellowman, you know him, they control him all the time. Th ey [the Mande] think they own the country. But it was the Diola who were here fi rst – you know.’ Th is diff erentiation between who belongs to the nation – who is indigenous and who is not – constitutes the nation. As the dividing line between nation A and nation B, its existence complicates the ability of nation A/B to exist. How to integrate people from diff erent national backgrounds into a single society has 98 Markus Rudolf therefore remained a question that haunts nation-states. Public debate in the West (Washington Post 2010) centres on the question of immigrants’ varying points of reference with respect to values, traditions and behaviour. Th ere appears to be a serious eff ort to defi ne a framework by which to judge whether or not immigrants comply with the ideal conception of a citizen of the given nation- state. Th e question of belonging is also debated in migrants’ countries of origin, but from a diff erent perspective. A country like Senegal tries to profi t from its migrant communities worldwide, and politicians plead for investment by the international diaspora (africa-eu-partnership 2010; Fleury 2012; Red Mangrove Development Advisors 2012). Th is last example illustrates two points that commonly arise in the debate concerning integration. First, the administrative answer to the question of belonging in general is often infl uenced by economic considerations. Second, the question of whether a diaspora is ignored or courted, and whether migrants are integrated or rejected, is answered from within the prevailing logic of the nation- state. Such a perspective becomes clearly problematic when diaspora communities produce claims to a homeland that is not included in the landscape of modern nation-states.9 After all, diasporas are transnational. Th erefore it seems worthwhile to refl ect on their role in nation-building. During the last decades the goal for studies of nation-building has been to explain how this construct – the nation-state – has become the supreme form of political organization worldwide.10 It is also interesting to analyse how this social construction became the most important manner of identifi cation for individuals as well.

Transformation of the Term Diaspora For the purposes of this essay ‘Diaspora’ is analysed as a counterexample, and thus the term must fi rst be clearly defi ned. Diaspora studies show that the African and Jewish Diasporas are paradigmatic in both popular and scientifi c discourse (Cohen 2008; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). Historically the Jewish Diaspora essentially created the term. It stems from the scattering of the Jews by the Bab- ylonians (sixth century bc) and the Romans (ad 70).11 It also has been used to describe the consequences of the later transatlantic slave trade (fi fteenth to nineteenth centuries). Today it can be argued that it has become an undiff erentiated word of identifi cation with various meanings for diff erent circumstances. Never- theless, the classical defi nition of Diaspora goes back to the Greek term meaning ‘dispersion’. And because it is historically defi ned fi rst and foremost by Jewish history, the meaning goes beyond a mere synonym for dispersion. Th e features that are most important to keep in mind for a working defi nition are the following: Th e historic case is characterized by a homeland, which defi nes a common point of reference for people scattered by force, who in consequence migrate, hold a minority status abroad, and establish a transnational community that persists over Identity Beyond ID 99 time and space.12 Today the term diaspora is ever expanding – Chinese, Lebanese and Armenian diasporas are joined by countless others. One might come to the conclusion that the meaning of the term itself has become so ‘dispersed’ that its actual analytical value is doubtful (Brubaker 2005). But to keep matters simple, here the analysis of diaspora groups is used only to make possible a broad comparison of the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Th e concept is employed to assess the modes of belonging of group members from both the majority and the minority. Th is chapter therefore proposes to look at diaspora on diff erent levels. Th e concept shall be applied to a well-known international case as well as to examples within a nation in order to approach the concept of everyday nationalism and the prioritization of identifi cations from diff erent perspectives. To start with an example of a classical migration group overseas: Senegalese are well known for their workforce diaspora. Senegalese people will tell you that a young man generally is expected to seek out his fortune abroad.13 Th ere are Senegalese communities in Gabon and other oil-producing countries of Africa and the Middle East, but the destination of choice is Europe – particularly France – and French-speaking Canada.14 It is most of all the French diaspora that is ever present in Senegalese media, politics and family networks: it would be hard to fi nd any (extended) Senegalese family without relatives in France. But while in Senegal ethnic diff erentiation stratifi es society and overrules national identifi cation, Senegalese abroad reach a common national identifi cation that overrides such diff erences. According to the label attached to them by outsiders who are unaware of any regional diff erentiation, the Senegalese diaspora to a certain degree is labelled, and perceives itself, as a homogeneous group.15 As a member of the diaspora in Paris stated: Once Senegalese arrive in France they become the same. He also said that no other sub-Senegalese community – such as a Casamançais or any other regional diaspora – was visible and recognizable in France.

Shifting of Boundaries In diff erent circumstances markers of distinctions might diff er. Th e same person identifi ed as a Senegalese in France may have a last name that is rather uncommon in his region of origin, the Casamance.16 One such person explained how he had to convince people that he truly was a native to the region when he was still living there.

Les gens ont dit que je suis Nordiste. On connaît que ça [the last names common in the region]. Je disais – Tu es malade, je suis d’ici, grandi ici. Il fallait que je m’explique. … [Abbé] Diamacoune a raconté d’un grand guerrier au temps [who was from the Casamance and bore the same last name].17 100 Markus Rudolf

In other words, he had to defend his status as an autochthon by pointing out his and his family’s origin, stretching the latter back in time and supporting his story with an account of the political leader (Abbé Diamacoune) of the secession movement. Th e discrepancy between how an individual’s markers become relevant for his social placement in his region of origin and how they are relevant in his exile in the diaspora seems odd at fi rst. But the mechanisms underlying this discrepancy will crystallize more clearly when the comparison is expanded. Spe- cifi cally, the international (France) / regional (Casamance) case will be contrasted with the transnational (Gambia) / national (Dakar/Ziguinchor) cases. First, though, it is necessary to explain the label Nordiste, mentioned above. A divide exists between people from Senegal’s north and south (namely the Casa- mance). Th ere are many other points of rupture within Senegal, but this north/ south division has been the source of a low-grade civil war since 1982.18 A secession movement in the Casamance has violently challenged the nation-building project of Senegal. In consequence the Casamançais are stereotyped as conspira- torial rebels and regarded as outsiders from and within Senegal. For this reason, the Casamançais are an apt group through which to determine whether the analytical tool at issue in this chapter can be applied, and whether our understanding benefi ts by analysing the Casamançais as a diaspora. Applying the concept allows elaboration on certain peculiarities of the Casamance confl ict: for example, that the Diola are said to be both the fi ercest supporters of secession (for an overview of the debate see Barbier-Wiesser 1994) and one of the best integrated groups in Senegal (Foucher 2002) appears contradictory. However, this contradiction can be resolved by placing a spotlight on groups that are not integrated and using the concept of diaspora. Such an approach reveals how individuals’ belonging to a regional (Casamançais) or national (Senegalese) project is related to the confl ict. It is indeed a dialectical relation: the former are shaped and reifi ed by the latter and vice versa: ‘Les nordistes, ce sont des racistes. Ce n’est pas comment chez nous’, was the experience of Diatta, a Casamançais in northern Senegal. ‘Ils te disent rebelle. Tous les Casaçais pour eux sont des rebelles. On te insulte. Ils ne connaissent pas Cabrousse – ou est-il. Le confl it ce sont les nordistes. … Ils di- rigent tout. On ne peut rien faire.’ When questioned about how he is identifi ed and labelled as a Casamançais, Diatta said: ‘Moi, je parle mieux Wolof qu’eux. Mais quand ils entendent [que tu parle] Diola…’ here he paused, then summarized: ‘… c’est mieux chez moi’.19 After years of working in the north, Diatta fi nally returned to his hometown for economic reasons and apparently also because he had been unable to integrate on a personal level in the north.20

Diaspora within the Nation Is the case of the Diola above a singular case, or is it representative of a common pattern? To answer this question we asked Casamançais in Dakar (N = 133) Identity Beyond ID 101 whether they socialize mostly with other Casamançais, and how they appraise the relations between northerners and Casamançais. We were interested in the length of time the interviewees had been in Dakar and the level of integration they experienced in their jobs, religious practices and daily lives, always keeping in mind that there are no apartheid-like ghettoes in Dakar that separate the dif- ferent ethnic groups. Th e relative unanimity of opinions was extraordinary.21 Th e interviewees pointed out that most of the non-Casamançais in Dakar stereotyped the Casa- mançais as rebels. Th erefore the Casamançais kept mostly to themselves, confi ning interactions with northerners to professional life. On the one hand, the Casamançais appear well integrated into modern Senegalese society. In general they have been integrated into certain professions (housework, security, military) more successfully than most other groups (see Foucher 2002), as is especially visible in Dakar.22 On the other hand, the people who were questioned clearly felt they had not managed to fi t in. Th is self-perception is characterized by the attributes of diaspora: a people migrate from home; they are identifi ed as diff erent and classifi ed into a certain group; and even though they have been dispersed, their community transcends space and national identifi cation (Söke- feld 2006). Another question arises: To what extent is diaspora necessarily about distance? Of course dispersion as such necessarily includes being distant from one another. But an often-implied prerequisite to qualify as a diaspora – that is, that an ocean or similar great distance has to separate people from their homeland – does not even hold true for the Jewish Diaspora.23 No studies have as yet highlighted the Casamançais/Diola24 diaspora in Dakar. Th is might be due to the fact that this label does not appear to be verifi able – there is no such thing as a fi xed minority status. Th ere are, on the contrary, many examples of individuals activating diff erent layers to fl exibly alter their transnational and regional identity according to the circumstances (de Jong 2002). Further, neither personal observation nor previous research shows that the Diola are more marginalized than any other ethnic group in Senegal (Diouf 1994).25 Finally, even if diaspora is not about long-distance dispersion in theory, it might not be applicable as an analytical tool for short-distance diaspora in practice.

Nobody Is from Here Th e above doubts seem justifi ed after a closer look at a short-distance diaspora. Shifting focus from the national to the regional level to consider how individuals are identifi ed in Ziguinchor, diaspora suddenly seems omnipresent. Ziguinchor is the capital of the region of the same name and is also the old capital of the Cas- amance (a region that has been divided to undercut the separatism cause linked to the old name). Th e city was founded by the Portuguese, who were the fi rst 102 Markus Rudolf

Europeans to colonize along the Casamance River. Th e Portuguese were never active administrators in the region, so present-day Ziguinchor is a relatively new city that has only recently experienced tremendous growth. Still, it began as a Portuguese settlement in a region where founding families are traditionally the landowners, who function as the hosts of whomever is a latecomer. Just as it is acknowledged that the Portuguese were the founders, it is common knowledge that the original population was Bainouk, who once maintained rice fi elds on the land now occupied by the Casamance capital. Th erefore the Bainouk and their Creole descendants are considered the landowners. ‘Ici, personne n’est d’ici’,26 a young man explained in Boudoudi, a neighbourhood in Ziguinchor.27 ‘Chacun a son village, c’est un rencontre, c’est le capital’.28 All respondents to a survey in Boudoudi stated that they were from other villages.29 A young man born in Dakar and bearing a common Bainouk name (patronym) declares himself to be from Brin, the next village. He visits his offi cial home village ‘régulièrement’, but even though it is only a few kilometres away, ‘c’est ici que je connais plus’.30 Boudoudi was among the original settlements, and one of its peculiarities is that after Senegalese independence, it was displaced to build government housing for ‘fonctionnaires’ [civil servants]. Displacement in this case actually meant moving as little as two blocks – a hundred metres – back from the river into the rice paddies. Th e tiny neighbourhood of Boudoudi con- sists of two paved streets with modern apartment buildings between them, and a few dozen rather unstable houses behind the modern block. In other words, in Boudoudi the expropriated landowners live next to the land titleholders who profi t from this displacement. Th is is especially interesting, considering that people continue to regard a northern governor’s expropriation of Bainouk/Diola rice fi elds as the root cause of the confl ict. It is said he gave the land to his compatriots from northern Senegal. Th e rice paddies were on the river, in swampland on both sides of the colonial harbour. Th e western side, right next to the governor’s seat, is the neighbourhood of Boudoudi. According to a common line of argumentation that classifi es the confl ict in the Casamance as a clash of interests between landlords and intruders, the antagonism between the two groups in Boudoudi is the confl ict’s fl ashpoint.31 Boudoudi, in other words, is an open wound, a constant reminder of the problem underlying the Casamance confl ict. But our survey in the neighbourhood showed that on both sides, people refer to their original villages outside Bou- doudi in identifying themselves. Th at is, neither side feels as though it comes ‘from there’ – from Boudoudi. It is true that the ‘northerners’ are found only in the new part, but Creole/Bainouk/Diola as ‘originaires du Ziguinchor’ live alongside them and with other original Casamançais in the new blocks as well. In other words, the very confl ict that has cast the Diola in the role of conspirators, rebels, challengers of nation-building – and thus the very reason they are isolated as a de facto diaspora in Dakar – is said to be rooted in the expropriation perceptible Identity Beyond ID 103 in Boudoudi; yet the division between Casamançais and northerners is far from visible in the very neighbourhood itself.

Diaspora or Latecomers? If being amongst foreigners means being in a diaspora, then there could be a diaspora ‘around every corner’: a scattering from one’s homeland might only be as far as the next village. Quaintly enough, in the Casamance, ‘foreigner’ essentially means anyone who does not belong to the same quartier or neighbourhood. ‘When my father went to the next village [a stone’s throw away] he took his arms with him’32 was a common description of the hostile – and above all, isolated – situation that characterized villages in the region. By pointing to this oral history, to narratives of historic rivalries, to diff erences in the language and to specifi c customs separating one village (and often each quartier) from another, distinctions of exclusion can be claimed. In a similar matter but to a converse end, integration can be emphasized: by pointing to a common descent (from a village, or a region from which forefathers immigrated) or to a common resistance against outsiders (slave traders [Baum 1999] or French colonizers [Mark 1985: 66–67]), historic ties can be stressed in order to establish similarities and union with others. Depending on the specifi c context, the identifi cation changes and expands, presenting a series of nesting categories: quartier (e.g. Djibonker) – village (e.g. Youtou) – kingdom (e.g. Bayot) – region (e.g. Kasa) – department (e.g. Ziguinchor) – nation (e.g. Casamance) – state (e.g. Senegal). It may appear complicated, but it is also the basic answer to the most common greeting: ‘Kasu- may (Peace), what is your name? Where are you from?’ As to the effi cacy of the label ‘internal diaspora’, one might argue that it makes little sense to speak of a migration next door, but in fact many internally displaced people live next door to one another in the Casamance, and they have in fact been dispersed by force. In the end it seems a matter of choice whether both characteristics are counted as a given or not.33 Here violence is seen as a crucial element of the working defi nition, whereas a minimal distance (e.g. in kilometres) or a certain quality of distance (across an ocean) is not regarded as a prerequisite. Violence is counted as an element if it is perceived as such by the individuals concerned. Th e objective criterion for distance becomes a self-defi ned remoteness. But what are the advantages to analysing a given situation relying on the categories of diaspora? Where does it make the picture sharper rather than more blurry to speak of diasporas? Landlord/stranger relations seem the more appropriate term in many cases. Th erefore, applying the analytical term diaspora depends on which social condition you want to label.34 Historically, Diaspora is about forced displacement and permanent migration from home.35 And of course other terms might cover all of these conditions just as well. But diaspora is also characterized as a social materialization of a perceived/ascribed common point of 104 Markus Rudolf reference for identifi cation. Th is point of reference provides a transnational mode of belonging, but at the same time it hinders the group from embracing the local identity.36 Th is does not mean that the minority has no say in the label that is applied to them. But having been excluded from the majority’s we-group, individuals have a big incentive to integrate themselves into the other-group in which they are categorized. For instance, your counterpart in the north might simply ignore your point of reference, say, Cabrousse, and insist on another label, say, Diola, Casaçais, or rebel.37 You do not fi t into his group; furthermore, you are integrated into another group – a negative of his, an ‘other’ group contrasted to ‘us’. Individuals react diff erently. Th ey can accept and embrace their ascribed status as ‘other’, they can accept but still seek to alter this ‘other’ status, or they can seek to escape it. Th e escape option works in one of two ways. Individuals can lay claim to the ‘we’ group – a process observable, for example, in assimilation via assertion of common historic or ethnic affi liation by individuals among both the Diola and Wolof, who now claim to have emigrated from Egypt. Or individuals may seek to enter a diff erent ‘other’ group – for example, to be identifi ed as a (regional) Casamançais, or as a (transnationally orientated) youngster rather than accepting an (ethnic) identifi cation as a Diola. Th e frame of reference and the situation defi ne who you are. Th e question is to whom you are speaking, and under what circumstances. Th e same man may speak of the Senegalese as ‘us’ when he talks about himself as part of a Senegalese diaspora in France, but then refer to the Senegalese as ‘them’ (‘who will never understand us [the Casamançais]’) when discussing the confl ict in the Casamance; then again, he may even refer to other Casamançais as ‘them’ when explaining the problem of being accepted as a true originaire (an autochthon) de la Casamance because of his untypical family name.

Diff erentiation of Otherness Consideration of similarities to other diasporas and systematic comparison with the working defi nition of diaspora can aid the analysis of the situation and its consequences. Th is perspective might lead to an understanding of how identifi cations are prioritized. Let us keep in mind that migration does not lead automatically to the formation of a diaspora. Even if the stipulations of forced migration, subsequent minority status, anchors in the homeland and rudimentary transnational networks are met, assimilation is not impossible. Th e fi rst benefi t of focusing on the diaspora is the insight gained into a given society’s capacity to accept integration. Th e question then becomes how fl exible culturally constructed diff erences are.38 Describing the ascribed and perceived attributes separating diaspora from the majority provides clues to the answer. On one hand are markers that are perceived to be essential for the majority (through a negative image of what constitutes group membership); on the other hand are the features of identifi cation that bind the diaspora together. Looking at a diaspora such as that of Identity Beyond ID 105 the Casamançais in Dakar, furthermore, makes diff erentiation markers salient when they otherwise would not be detectable. Simmel pointed out an often overlooked quality of strangers: Th e stranger is diff erent by defi nition – he is strange, not like ‘us’, his ‘otherness’ is evident. But if the ‘other’ is similar and close, then distance and diff erence (in discourse) have to be reifi ed more assertively. A self is established by boundaries that distinguish a similar other – not a complete stranger (Simmel 1992 [1908]). In sum, the less obvious the diff erences are, the more strongly they have to be affi rmed. In other words, the less distinguishable the markers of diff erences are, the more explicit they must be. Th e cases in the Casamance frontier zone seem to contradict this last point. Here we return to the observation of Daouda, the Casamançais living in Gambia who was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Historically, the Diola population of Gambia has lived in the Brikama and Fogni region of Gambia – not in Banjul and Serrekunda. In the last decades the latter areas have seen a large infl ux of Gambian and Senegalese Diola migrants who nevertheless are not seen as foreigners – unlike migrants from Northern Senegal who also moved to these urban areas. Here one might reconsider the earlier quote describing the Gambian Diola as the ‘fi rst’ historical natives – that is, as the true ancestors of Gambia. Even as the ‘other’ is a necessary asset to establish a self, the question of who is considered the ‘other’ obviously depends on the circumstances. Th e Gambian and the Senegalese Diola are not diff erentiated in the lines of argumentation observed. Rather, it seems that especially in the metropolitan area of Serrekunda, the dividing line does not run between national groups but between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘others’.39 In this case the ‘others’ are usually ‘Freetonians’ or ‘Nigerians’. But the national and linguistic markers of distinctions are subject to situational shifts: in one instance it is them the Francophones versus us the Anglophones, with Nigerians and Freetonians included in the latter group. But in another instance it is us ‘the locals’ or ‘the indigenous’ versus them the ‘foreigners’, assigning Mande, Diola and Wolof to the fi rst group and the non-Gambian Anglophone population to the other. Th e point is that the Casamançais groups do not fi gure as prominent ‘other’ groups. On the contrary, they are mostly subsumed into one’s own group in order to prove autochthony. Th e Mande will stress that many Diola are often already considered Mande (e.g. in the Karon region), as they have adapted Mande traditions and language. Th is reference seemingly serves to substantiate the narrative of glorious Mande kingdoms of the past civilizing the region. Th e same pattern of autochthonization is observable within other ethnic groups: Peul who arrived from the Fouta Djallon highlands of Guinea-Conakry refer to the Casamançais Peul from the Fuladou region of Senegal to stress their autochthonous status, arguing that those Casamançais groups are more indigenous than the Mande, as indicated in Ousmane’s statement earlier. Ultimately this is seen as proof that the Peul are more indigenous than the Mande. Th at is, there is a tendency to 106 Markus Rudolf integrate and co-opt the Casamançais in order to establish an autochthony that is recognized in Gambia.

How Firstcomers in the Casamance Become Latecomers in Senegal Th e diff ering levels of integration in similar conditions (as in the region Sene- gambia, which is often regarded as a single historical and sociocultural entity) show how circumstances can be decisive. In such situations relatively slight dissimilarities may be highlighted to stress diff erence (Dakar), whereas in other situations (frontier Casamance) these same dissimilarities would be considered quite minor. In sum, it is obvious that the process of identifi cation is diff erent for migrants overseas, migrants within the nation, internally displaced people inside the homeland and transnational short-distance migrants (see below). People living across the border as refugees showed many parallels with people living in Dakar in diaspora, but the Diola living in exile across the border in Gambia and Guinea-Bissau showed more integrative qualities than members of the diaspora in Dakar. Th e hypothesis is that they embody transnational ties, because they are the majority and ‘at home’. Another observation underlines how surrounding conditions, rather than the features themselves, defi ne the quality of a marker: if virtually everywhere ‘nobody comes from here’, then a factor that sets you apart from the majority in Dakar binds you together in Ziguinchor. In both cities a majority of residents are immigrants, but obviously the identifi cation as a Casa- mançais and a Senegalese is diff erent. In Dakar it was much harder to speak about the Casamance in the fi rst place. People were much more suspicious and unwill- ing to talk about their identifi cation. But diff erences with the north were hardly ever mentioned in the Casamance, even though it is the place where people suff er from the confl ict (said to be caused by those very diff erences). In Dakar it was much easier to get an idea of what binds the Casamançais together and to isolate their respective markers (beyond a common fate through an external threat). Dif- ferent groups in Dakar were set apart (and assimilated them into smaller units, sometimes even antagonistic ones) by the same condition that brought them together in Ziguinchor – namely, not being from the place they lived in. Th e research fi ndings encircle what appears to be the crucial element for analysis: the identifi cation Casamançais, a category that has unquestionably been used. Currently, this category is closely linked to the Casamance confl ict. Th e political wing of the Casamance rebels always claim to have been fi ghting for the values that the Senegalese nation inherited from the French: Liberté, égalité, fraternité! Even though the population has been subjected to discrimination on an ethnic base, the rebels have not played the ethnic card – for example to draft or to ‘motivate’ combatants.40 Instead they have chosen to criticize the state for betraying these values and failing to fully integrate its citizens. But how, then, are the ranks of the rebels fi lled, if not on an ethnic, religious, generation, class Identity Beyond ID 107 or clan basis? What actually ties individuals together? Who claims autonomy or independence? Th e research found a common denominator: identifi cation as Casamançais (Rudolf 2013). In this case then – to grasp the markers – the study of the diaspora in Dakar turned out to be the most rewarding. Th e identifi cation Casamançais proved to be based on common cultural practices, similar sociopolitical systems, a common ascribed label and a common self-identifi cation embracing this label.41 Th e hypothesis shows that this Casamançais identity sustains itself – apart from exclusion and discrimination – by performances, especially initiation rituals through which the community is united and reifi ed (Mark, de Jong and Chupin 1998; de Jong 2007; Mark 1992, 1994). To do so, Casamançais from every part of their diaspora must make an eff ort to return to their village of origin in the Casamance in order to participate; in this way the entire extended family is able to contribute. Extended family members then live together for a time, whereby the community becomes visible, graspable and enacted repeatedly. Casa- mançais themselves often point to participation in life-cycle rituals, even those co-organized with diff erent ethnic groups, as a strong identifi cation marker. Such opinions should be accepted as valid, for the performance – the joint experience of community, of singing, dancing and eating together and being a part of the organization team – should not be underestimated.42 Identity is by and large performed; it is both reifi ed and recognized in performances.43

Conclusion: Diaspora as an Analytical Tool Studying the various levels of integration experienced in diff ering contexts in diasporas has proven to be fruitful, with social mechanisms becoming salient and underlying structures being revealed. Examples in the region at issue indicate that diaspora is not the opposite of integration; rather, carrying out research in a diaspora is an outstanding approach for understanding the conditions that do or do not exist for integration. For its recent nation-building, Sierra Leone has deployed a Krio-diaspora identity and language to unify people (Knörr 2010). Th e role of the Creole in Guinea-Bissau has been similar. Even though the creole identity has never been proclaimed as a unifying model in this case, it has nonetheless played an implicitly decisive role in nation-building (Trajano Filho 2010). As a clearly formulated category, diaspora as an analytical term can be used to assess social identifi cations across neighbourhoods and the Seven Seas alike.44 In analysing identifi cation, its advantage over other categories is that diaspora captures a trans(across/beyond)-national/regional/local dimension, whether as a tacit or explicit identifi cation, that in regard to the prioritized national identity provides its group members with an exit option that would not have been apparent otherwise. Looking only at how genealogies, language, religion, ethnicity and so on diff er among the Diola, Peul, Balanta and Manjacos in Dakar, one cannot grasp 108 Markus Rudolf their common reference of regional identifi cation and subsequently cannot com- prehend the grounds on which individuals refer to this identity. How many of the Casamançais actually identify themselves with this marker? How many are identifi ed as such, and by whom and for how long? Whether living in the region or in the diaspora, how many of them oppose, ignore, sympathize or support the secession movement? Many answers to these questions depend on the circumstances in which markers are identifi ed and appropriated by actors to include members in a group or exclude them from it (Donahoe et al. 2009). But the sine qua non for an analytical understanding in this regard is to identify what it is that qualifi es an individual for, or disqualifi es an individual from, membership.45 Th e genesis of social groups and their boundaries, markers, and identifi cation of actors, or in other words their dynamic evolution, is central to anthropological research and analysis. Periods of rapid social change have been identifi ed as especially suitable for discerning group boundary mechanisms (Schlee 2004, 2010). Th e analysis of diaspora holds similar promise for facilitating understanding of the relative importance that actors attribute to diff erent identifi cations. Th e examples presented herein furthermore should make clear that a case study of instances where nation-building fails to integrate its subjects (and make them national) has wider implications for diffi culties that the ‘nation-state’ model faces today, not only in postcolonial nations but virtually everywhere.

Acknowledgements Th is chapter beneﬁ tted from suggestions by Joanna Davidson, Ferdinand de Jong, Christian Højbjerg, Peter Mark, William Murphy and Wilson Trajano Filho, all of whom I wish to thank hereby.

Markus Rudolf is a researcher and lecturer in peace and confl ict studies and a consultant for humanitarian issues. He was a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale). His research focuses on confl ict analysis, protection, vulnerability, resilience and Do-No-Harm in DR Congo and Senegal. Currently he is working for the Bonn International Center for Con- version (BICC). Among his recent publications are Assessing the Humanitarian Response to Chronic Crisis in North Kivu (Do More Good Consortium 2014) and ‘Integrating Confl ict: Assessing a Th irty Years War’ (Ph.D. thesis 2013).

Notes 1. All names are changed to guarantee anonymity. Interview Ziguinchor, 2009. 2. Th e English translations provided here are based on recollections of conversations that were recorded in writing later. Th e French quotes are as faithful to the original structure Identity Beyond ID 109

and style of the spoken word as possible, even though the language used may not be grammatically correct. 3. Gambia is completely contained within Senegalese territory, except for its short western border where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. Th e Senegalese territory south of Gambia, stretching to the border with Guinea-Bissau and cut off from the north of Senegal by Gambia, is the region of Casamance. It comprises the greatest density of ethnic groups in Senegal, of which the Diola is the dominant ethnicity. Th e north in turn has a diff erent ethnic, religious, climatic and social mosaic, and here the Wolof are the most prominent. A low-grade confl ict between those two parts of Senegal has plagued the country since 1982, occasionally aff ecting and involving the neighbouring countries of Gambia and Guinea-Bissau. 4. Identifi cation here points to a process. Th e term ‘identity’ in turn is understood as the result of this process. As a social fact both the process and the result are seen as fl uid, dynamic and situational (for a deeper discussion of this issue, see Richard Jenkins 2000; Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Donahoe et al. 2009). 5. Th e uppercase ‘Diaspora’ is used here for the paradigmatic cases, while the lowercase ‘diaspora(s)’ is used elsewhere. 6. In other words, the Casamançais include those who refer to villages in the Casamance as their places of origin. 7. Th e terms ‘autochthon’ and ‘native’ are used synonymously here; both are rarely used in the Casamance. Usually the diff erentiation is made through labels: ‘we/them’; ‘from here/not from here’; ‘they come from …’, ‘they originate in …’. In Gambia the term ‘indigenous’ is used, while generally in Senegal (outside of the Casamance) ‘autochthon’ is used. In both cases it is assumed everybody knows who is native and who is not. Yet, the fl exibility of boundaries is astonishing. 8. Both the Wolof and the Peul are not uncommon in the region. Th ere are Wolof villages (such as Loudia Wolof) in the Casamance, and the Wolof are numerous in Gambia. Th e Peul (also called the Fula) are the majority in the Fulada region of Casamance, and since this region is between Gambia and Guinea-Conakry, the Peul/Fula from the area are considered in-between as well: as Casamançais, they are autochthons to the Senegambia region and are diff erentiated from the more ‘fair-skinned’ Peul/Fula from Guinea-Co- nakry, mostly traders who are considered foreigners. It is interesting to note that many complaints about Wolofi zation – that is, the ever increasing infl uence of the Wolof people and Wolof language – are also linked to their position in trade. 9. Th e best-known example of a diaspora claiming its own nation-state is the Kurds. Th eir relation to the homeland and self-image is considerably diff erent from other examples (Wahlbeck 2002; Alinia 2004; Curtis 2005). Other, less prominent cases, such as the Parsi and Ismaili communities, are equally interesting for comparison regarding the concept of homeland and transnational nationalism (Hinnells 1994; Kassam-Remtulla 1999; Falzon 2003). 10. Hobsbawm, Anderson and others have shown how nation-building is grounded in a primordial, essentialist and ex post explanation (discourse) of the status quo: A rigid national history is constructed from the present ex post: natural national identity stretches back through time (Kohn 1967; Hobsbawm 1992; Tilly 1992; Anderson 1999). 11. From the Oxford Dictionaries Online (2010): diaspora(dias|pora), Pronunciation:/diasp(ə)rə. Noun (often the Diaspora): Jews living outside Israel. Th e dispersion of the Jews beyond Israel. Th e dispersion or spread of any people from their original homeland. People who have spread or been dispersed from their homeland. 110 Markus Rudolf

Th e main diaspora began in the 8th–6th centuries bc, and even before the sack of Jerusalem in ad 70, the number of Jews dispersed by the diaspora was greater than that living in Israel. … Origin: Greek, from diaspeirein ‘disperse’, from dia ‘across’ + speirein ‘scatter’. Th e term originated in the Septuagint (Deuteronomy 28:25) in the phrase esē diaspora en pasais basileias tēs gēs ‘thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth’. 12. Th e four characteristics chosen are both specifi c enough to distinguish diasporas from other transnational groups and broad enough not to be confi ned to a single case, as to a certain extent are Safran’s (1991) often-cited six points. Th is essay intends to show whether this working defi nition is of any value for comparative analysis. 13. Whether an immigrant should take his bride and consequently establish his family abroad, too, is a matter of discussion among Senegalese. Most men nowadays feel that women become ‘uncontrollable’ once they live in Europe or North America. Th erefore the preferred model is to build a house and leave the spouse(s) and children in the country of origin. Female migration diff ers: It is virtually confi ned to seasonal work in the region or to ‘follow a Toubab’ (a white man). In the fi rst case the immigrant is without children, and the second entails the question of establishing a family, predating migration, and guarantees its permanency (Fleischer 2008). 14. For a better understanding of the context in Senegal see Lambert (2002) and Wabgou (2008); for the role of remittances see Jettinger (2005); and for Italy see Sinatti (2006). 15. Th is of course is a stereotype not shared by or valid for all individuals. 16. Whoever has been to Senegal has observed the greeting ceremony in which, after questions on well-being, there inevitably follow questions on name, last name and origin. Th ese are the coordinates used to position the communication partner and eventually discover links to individual networks. 17. ‘People said I am a Nordiste. Th ey do not know anything. I told them you are mad, I am from here. I grew up here. I had to explain myself. … Diamacoune told about a great warrior once upon time’ (interview, Paris, September 2009). 18. Evans and Foucher, among others, off er brief summaries of the complex Casamance confl ict (Evans 2003; Foucher 2007). 19. ‘Th e Nordistes, they are racists. It is not like here. Th ey call you a rebel. All the Casaçais are rebels for them. You are insulted. Th ey do not know Cabrousse – where it is. The confl ict, that are the northerners … they direct everything. You cannot do anything … I speak Wolof better than they do. But if they hear Diola … It is better at home’ (Diatta, interview in Cabrousse, March 2011). 20. Th is decision was reached a year after participating in his home village’s Bukut, a Diola initiation ritual that plays a central role in the process of identifi cation as Casamançais (Rudolf 2014). 21. Nevertheless, the Diola are far from unanimous in their approach to living in Dakar. Many in fact do try to mingle and become less noticeable. Th is might cause biased results: the individual identifi cation depends on the circumstances, and the survey was not representative. But the issue here is not whether all Diola feel and act as a tightly organized diaspora, but whether the conditions are such that they are encouraged to do so, and how much individuals are aware of it. 22. It might be argued that an already high level of integration into the modern system of education and public work is a precondition for individuals to perceive themselves as lagging behind. Playing according to the rules sets the ground for aspirations that in the end cause individuals to feel alienated and consequently to distance themselves. Identity Beyond ID 111

23. What tends to be overlooked in the classical defi nitions closely attached to the historic Jewish case is that even Jews who were living in the homeland, e.g., in Jerusalem, could be considered part of the Diaspora because they were not living in a Jewish state. Th e same could be said for the Orthodox to this very day; only the Messiah can lead them out of the Diaspora. 24. For a number of reasons Diola and Casamançais are often equated. First, as has been shown, outsiders tend to equate the Diola and Casamançais in everyday practice. Numer- ous people outside the Casamance, especially in the north of Senegal, affi rmed this stereotype: ʻCasamançais? – the Diola. Like here in Fatick people are called Fatickois. Here everybody is Serer. Th ere they are Diola’ (interview, Fatick, February 2011). Second, on a political level the government demonized the secession movement as an ethnic uprising and blamed the Diola along with the Casamançais: according to the government’s logic the two groups are essentially the same, so if one group is labelled as rebels, the other is too. Th ird, no research has been done exclusively on the Casamançais as such. Th e vast majority of the comparative studies in what now is the Département de Ziguinchor are mostly fi led under the label Diola. 25. Studies have shown that the Diola are better educated and better integrated into the state apparatus than other ethnic groups in many aspects, but there are no studies focusing on other Casamance ethnic groups such as the Balanta, Manjacos and so on, which are usually subsumed under Guinea-Bissau. 26. ‘Here [in Ziguinchor] nobody is from here’. 27. Sagna, Boudoudi – various interviews, February–September 2008. 28. ‘Everybody has his village, this is a meeting point, it is the capital’. 29. Survey conducted in Boudoudi households in 2008. 30. ‘Regularly’/ ‘It is here I know better’. 31. Th e landlord/stranger relation in general (Mouser 1975), as in a diachronic analysis, is of particular interest in the Casamance – especially with regard to the question of who owns land. During its history the region has seen many invasions (Mark 1985). Many regional inhabitants fl ed to remote backwater islands and often ended up settling there. Current points of contention are land issues regarding hotels (Cabrousse), the question of national borders for the purposes of farming rights (along the southern border) and the previously mentioned claim that the northerners had taken land from the southerners. Furthermore, fi erce disputes between villages revolve around whether land was loaned or given away permanently, based on historical founder/latecomer claims. A thorough historical study of these cases, as they play out in modern courtrooms, would prove illuminating. 32. Interview with a villager from Edioungou, August 2008. 33. Diaspora is not solely about being dispersed over a great distance, as has been pointed out. Nevertheless distance might well be the most crucial element of dispersion to consider in the future. Modern means of communication have made distance more relative than ever. Isolation of minorities who have migrated from their homelands is therefore greatly reduced. In the global village, the sheer abundance of means of transnational communication aff ects integration more than anything else. Whereas transnational orientation among migrants (often already in the second and third generations) used to be the exception – and mostly was due to religious beliefs – it could become the rule, simply because distance from the homeland has shrunk in manifold ways. 34. Migrant is the encompassing entity, and landlord/stranger the encompassing relationship. Both are preconditions but do not necessarily produce conditions for a diaspora – the question is how and when these conditions are met. 112 Markus Rudolf

35. Consequences of the transatlantic slave trade have been studied in this region, but the role of the Diola diaspora has drawn comparatively less attention in the social sciences. Focusing on transregional or transnational ties, however, furthers understanding of the mechanisms of group boundaries, their construction and their origins. Discussion of the ties between the diaspora and the rebellion has been quite heated in Senegal (see articles on the extradition of Nkrumah in the newspaper WalFadjri: http://www.walf.sn/poli tique/suite.php?rub=2&id_art=63020). 36. It is important to keep in mind that reifi cation of identifi cation markers depends on established categories of self and others according to the situation (Elwert 2002). 37. ‘Casaçais’ is the colloquial form for Casamançais, while ‘rebel’ is a derogatory label that politicians, military and police affi x to individuals who refer to themselves as combatants. While Casaçais and Diola are categories of identifi cation for both members and outsiders, rebel is simply a discriminatory label that excludes individuals from the community. 38. Social reality is understood here to be constructed, which does not imply any judgement about reality, that is, about the basis of the constructs. It simply acknowledges that our access is a culturally defi ned one, and therefore that no insights into anything outside of social reality can be off ered (Searle 1995; Berger and Luckmann 2003). But even if social reality in general and the consequent specifi c identifi cations are always subjectively constructed, this does not imply that identifi cations as ‘we’ and ‘others’ cannot rise to the level of great importance – or even become a matter of death or life – for the individuals involved. 39. In his diachronic analysis of this region, Nugent (2007) showed how its transborder quality has always been a decisive historical feature for its inhabitants. 40. Given the record of ethnic clashes in modern Africa, this seems extraordinary, and all the more so as there was a concerted policy to discriminate against the Diola – virtually all Diola have such experiences to relate. 41. Th e four (fl uid) markers for identifi cation identifi ed thus far include the following: (1) place of origin – marked by the quartiers’ oral history of the origin of ancestors; (2) common cultural events such as rituals – which the whole neighbourhood usually attends or follows; (3) common suff ering – grievances caused by livelihood, historical geopolitics, the current confl ict and so on; and (4) identifi cation imposed by outsiders that assigns someone to a particular ethnic or regional group such as the Diola and later the Casamançais. 42. Actually the hypothesis is that performance is the point where Identifi zierung –inter- personal identifi cation marking (being identifi able due to markers) – and Identifi kation – intrapersonal self-identifi cation (identifying oneself with markers) – can occur (Leary 2003). Th e relation and interaction between Identifi zierung and Identifi kation, in a dialectical relation with imposed social restrictions, is decisive for individuals’ fl exibility to choose, alter and switch identifi cation. 43. While such an opinion can be accepted as valid, its propagated qualities have to be diff erentiated: even though these markers are often explicitly called traditions, they nevertheless are fl exible and fl uid (cf. de Jong 2002). 44. Th e analysis of diasporas evidently helps to answer certain questions of nation-building. Is it possible for individuals to live in a certain nation-state and yet retain diff erent loyalties? When does the prioritized national identifi cation become relevant to such an extent that it becomes problematic for those who do not accept it? Which circumstances favour a diaspora’s upholding of its status instead of assimilating? 45. To provide another example relative to the Diaspora from which the word originates: if one had considered the diff erent ethnic or clan-based identifi cations in Ethiopia to assess the alternatives of individuals and predict possible confl ict lines and alliances in the Identity Beyond ID 113

1980s and 1990s, one would have been surprised to ﬁ nd that the exit option for some individuals was to claim an identity enabling them to immigrate to Israel (Abbink 1990). Speciﬁ cally, the Falasha claimed to belong to Israel tribes that have been considered ‘lost’ because the Bible does not mention them after the Babylonian captivity. Th e interesting twist concluding this chapter is that they were able to pursue their exit option by referring to the original Diaspora narrative.

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Oxford Dictionaries Online. 2010. ‘Defi nition of Diaspora from Oxford Dictionaries On- line’. Retrieved 17 December 2010 from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defi nition/ diaspora?view=uk. Red Mangrove Development Advisors. 2012. ‘France, Sénégal: Assistance to the Diaspora in Investing in Collective Projects’. Retrieved 9 May 2012 from http://www.rmda.eu/?p =555&lang=en. Rudolf, M. 2013. ‘Integrating Confl ict: Assessing a Th irty Years War’, Ph.D. thesis. Halle (Saale): Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Safran, W. 1991. ‘Diasporas in Modern Societies’, Diaspora 1: 82–99. Schlee, G. 2004. ‘Taking Sides and Constructing Identities: Refl ections on Confl ict Th eory’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(1): 135–56. ———. 2010. How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Th eory of Ethnic and Religious Confl ict. Ox- ford and New York: Berghahn Books. Searle, J.R. 1995. Th e Construction of Social Reality. New York: Th e Free Press. Simmel, G. 1992 [1908]. ‘Exkurs über den Fremden’, in Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, 11 vols. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 764–71. Sinatti, G. 2006. ‘Diasporic Cosmopolitanism and Conservative Translocalism: Narratives of Nation among Senegalese Migrants in Italy’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 6(3): 30–50. Sökefeld, M. 2006. ‘Mobilizing in Transnational Space: A Social Movement Approach to the Formation of Diaspora’, Global Networks 6(3): 265–84. Tilly, C. 1992. Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Trajano Filho, W. 2010. ‘Th e Creole Idea of Nation and Its Predicaments: Th e Case of Guinea- Bissau’, in J. Knörr and W. Trajano Filho (eds), Th e Powerful Presence of the Past. Leiden: Brill, pp. 157–83. Wabgou, M. 2008. ‘Governance of Migration in Senegal: Th e Role of Government in For- mulating Migration Policies’, in A. Adepoju, T. Van Naerssen and A. Zoomers (eds), International Migration and National Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Leiden: Brill, pp. 141–60. Wahlbeck, Ö. 2002. ‘Th e Concept of Diaspora as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Refugee Communities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28(2): 221–38. Washington Post. 2010. ‘Th e Burqa in France: Removing the Veil without Facing Society’s Shortcomings’. Retrieved 17 December 2010 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/30/AR2010093007367.html. Chapter 6 Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands Interaction, Integration and the Forging of an Immigration Policy Pedro F. Marcelino

Why Cape Verde? Irregular immigration and its root causes have become a political concern in the Cape Verde Islands. One might be inclined to ask why migrants come. Th e simple answer is that they come because the islands are there. It is a matter of geography. After 9/11, the paradigm of migration shifted, not only in North America but also, crucially, in Europe. Th rough a wide array of bilateral and multilateral agreements, individual European Union countries and the EU as a whole have managed to export their own migratory pressures to a belt of buff er nations in their immediate (and remote) vicinity: countries like Morocco, Libya, Turkey and, more recently, Mauritania and the Cape Verde Islands. Europe’s increasingly securitized and externalized immigration policies, along with the consequent pushing of its southernmost border farther south to North Africa, have caused trans-Saharan migration routes and networks to gradually shift westwards towards Morocco and Algeria, then southwards to the Western Sahara and Mauritania, and increasingly also to the Cape Verde Islands. Continental African migrants are today a conspicuous sight in Cape Verde’s main urban and tourist areas, part of a fl uid ethnoscape facilitated by a new geopolitical nexus encompassing West Africa, the Mediterranean and the Maghreb, and perhaps justifying the assertion that Europe’s de facto southern borders have now been pushed to Africa, making Cape Verde (among other countries) a rather incomplete proxy to – and a tool of – its own extemporaneous immigration policies. Th is chapter attempts to map out a pivotal contemporary moment in national discourse as the country changes from being a net exporter of migrants to a net receiver, or at least a trans-shipment centre for transit migrants. Many among them indeed enter the country legally under existing open-borders agreements Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 117 within the regional body ECOWAS.1 Unable to reach Europe from the islands, however, a majority eventually overstay their legal welcome. Th us becoming irregular aliens after entering the country, they are locked into a permanent state of legal limbo, informal incorporation and a bare life of sorts. Some choose to return home, while some cannot. Th e remaining ratio constitutes a group of increasingly disenfranchised denizens who are eff ectively – albeit inadvertently – challenging national self-concepts and even the idea of a unique ‘Capeverdeanness’ (Marcelino 2009: 56–62). Th e confl uence of the socioeconomic and ethno-racial dimensions is, this chapter argues, a primary reason for exclusion. Exclusion, however, will not prevent destitute but entrepre- neurial foreigners (particularly not those from nearby nations) from entering the country, legally or illegally, and thereafter asserting their own identities, engaging in a fl uid renegotiation of what becomes an ongoing hybridization of themselves and of Capeverdeanness itself. Once they are in the islands, the integration process is already underway. Cecil Foster notes that

each time an immigrant arrives … at least two things happen: [ﬁ rst] [s] he seeks to re-open and even restructure the compact that is the existing social order. Consensus, no matter how long it had taken to achieve, is threatened. And if there are many of them and the state is truly democratic, the new arrivals should be able to undo, rewrite, to change the constitution and the social order. … Second, the immigrant revitalizes older communities within the state by daily reinserting them into a Di- aspora of some kind, so that links with a motherland or fatherland that might atrophy with time are constantly renewed and re-freshened. … So through immigration, [national identity] is always in the state of becoming [and] the culture statewide is never settled. (Foster 2010)

Th is chapter attempts to debunk some of the myths related to Cape Verde’s ‘traditional’ racial blindness,2 and to what could be termed ‘hybridism’ (Marcelino 2009: 61) or an ideology of migration and innate tolerance and hospitality (morabeza) that often appears to be used in key Cape Verdean opinion-making circles as a justiﬁ cation to deny the existence of any racist undertones in current events in the islands while still enabling or excusing racialized discourses on ‘otherness’, ‘invasion’, and ‘crime’. Th ese challenges strengthen the vitality of the Cape Verdean case study as a liminal and transitional space where the dynamics and interconnectedness of migration, economic development and economic aspirations, integration, exclusion and xenophobia are representative of the struggles elsewhere in the world. In the words of Jason DeParle (2007) ‘the intensity of the national experience makes this barren archipelago the Galapagos of migration, a microcosm of the forces straining … politics and remaking societies across the globe.’ 118 Pedro F. Marcelino

Debunking Migrant Typologies Discussing migrant integration in Cape Verde requires the defi nition of a theoretical framework of migrant categories to explain why migrants elicit one reaction over another. It is paramount to underline that despite the existence of informally organized – and only insuffi ciently studied – cooperation circles among sub- Saharan migrants in Cape Verde, this remains an inchoately connected transnational community immersed in what Pedro Góis (2005) characterized as the practice of ‘low intensity transnationalism’ and Gina Sánchez Gibau (2008: 260–65) called a ‘dispersed nation’ and a ‘fractured diaspora’. In other words, this community is an ensemble of various diasporic nodes closely knit with their respective home communities, bound by a migration project represented by one of their own, and interacting across its diff erent nodes – perhaps a friend or relative in Rome, Paris, or Madrid – but with limited access to and contact with the host communities. Th e latter characteristic reduces the potential for integration, inclusion and vertical mobility, curbing the ability for upwards movement through hierarchies and statuses. Of course this does not mean that social ascension is not an objective of sub-Saharan migrants. Indeed, social prestige is an often overlooked but increasingly salient and signifi cant force in perpetuating migration. ‘Social prestige’ in sending communities is a signifi cant component of increasing aspirations to migrate, while ‘social expectations’ function as one of the most cited reasons to maintain one’s migration and continue one’s journey, geographically and socially, usually across several years in transit. As migratory routes and strategies for reaching their destinations become increasingly complex and costly, migration pressure may decline in sending communities. However, the one-dimensional presumption of exclusively economic reasons for the departure/arrival of labour migrants is insuffi cient to describe a complex portfolio of motivations and aspirations. Further, this assumption obfuscates the fi nding that, grosso modo, those who migrate are not the poorest of the poor (e.g. Nieswand 2011), as it often fails to consider ‘social meanings’ of migration that go well beyond economic motivations.3 Th is is perhaps not lost on Cape Verdeans, who are newly a host community and still a nation of migrants that continues to export its own (albeit to a lesser extent). Th e motivations of sub-Saharan migrants are thus easier to grasp and identify with. Th e hardship of the migratory experience is a common ordeal understood by locals, who often have friends and relatives abroad and are therefore acquainted with unspoken but easily comprehended narratives of sacrifi ce and endurance. A certain level of understanding should not, however, be mistaken with the unconditional acceptance of the migrants’ presence. Sub-Saharans in Cape Verde are often exposed to a paradox of cooperation and competition with locals. Th is nexus of solidarity and animosity, collaboration and competition, inclusion and Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 119 exclusion urges a closer look at the typologies of migrants arriving in Cape Verde. It is apparent, for instance, that there is an almost complete absence of a discourse on refuge. Formally and informally, everyone is branded as an economic migrant and thus assumed to be in the country illegally.4 Th is lack of understanding of the realities aff ecting those who factually are already part of the national ethnoscape is indicative of the level of formal disengagement still existing in the country at the levels of policy and the public. Th e absence of a public discourse on refuge and asylum to counterbalance that of simple migration is perhaps attributable to the country’s geographic isolation, but the same does not apply to categorizations of ‘clandestine’, ‘undocumented’, ‘irregular’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants. Cape Verdeans themselves have rarely abandoned the country in these latter circumstances, but they certainly have an understanding of their tremendous liminality. Why, then, the hesitation? Might it be related to the stress induced by a transformation from a net sender to a net receiver?

Th e Migration Dilemma: From Emigration to Immigration How do microstates respond to migration? How do they address and cope with the complex eff ects of migration on development, and how do they address the multiple consequences of immigration, economic struggles and identity? Th ese are some of the dilemmas facing the tiny insular republic of Cape Verde. Th ese questions, already deeply embedded in Cape Verdean history, came into sharper focus in 1991, when the archipelago was among the encouraging cluster of sub-Saharan African nations holding free elections for the fi rst time. A new government was elected on a platform that promised to push through a series of democratizing bills and introduce neoliberal economic reforms conducive to a business-friendly environment. Over the following decade, direct foreign investment and development aid packages poured in – at fi rst from Europe, the United States and supranational organizations, and later from China, Japan, Brazil and even Angola – often branded as technical cooperation packages. Twenty years later the quality of the country’s democracy compares favourably with that of most of its African peers, and a sizeable section of the population has been lifted out of the most abject poverty and is living comfortably by regional standards, with a substantially higher yearly income per capita (see e.g. Economist Intelli- gence Unit 2008; Afrobarometer 2004). Whereas neoliberal economic reforms modelled after Europe’s eff ectively brought about immediate economic growth, they also partially alienated the social democracy drive of the early years of independence under the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (Davidson 1989: 127–201). Chronically high unemployment levels associated with rural poverty continue to be the archipelago’s Achilles’ heel, disproportionably aff ecting the country’s peasant majority. Unequal income distribution has become increasingly apparent, even conspicu- 120 Pedro F. Marcelino ous, in the suburbs of Cape Verde’s main urban areas in the last few years (Inter- national Fund for Agricultural Development 2006). Th ese examples of uneven development are reinforced by the booming tourism and real estate industries, which feed an economy with above-average growth rates – even at a time of global economic crisis – aff ording the impression that in this little nation, life is indeed slowly becoming easier than in many of the neighbouring countries. Indeed, it is not simply institutional partners that are complimentary about the stability and unlikely success of this tiny nation. Th e narrative has also been fed to, or picked up and widely disseminated by, European and world media. Among migrant networks in West Africa, word seems to have spread that Cape Verde is a desirable temporary destination, or perhaps a preferable transit option in the long journey north, at a time when the Mediterranean border, staunchly patrolled by FRONTEX and other European outfi ts, is slowly closing, increasingly militarized and openly hostile. Consequently, besides enduring the growing pains that attend any major economic restructuring, Cape Verde has had to learn how to cope with a fast infl ow of migrants, many of them waiting to set off to the Canaries. Some have now waited so long that they might eventually be accommodating to a quasi-permanent state of temporary settlement. Many Cape Verdeans see the newcomers as living off expedientes or shady business, whether it is street selling (a contentious image issue in tourist-rich islands), sex work or worse. Th ese have become stereotypes by which African migrants are identifi ed, and a narrative that is often reproduced across all levels of society, though few Cape Verdeans encounter any migrants beyond the occasional bargaining with them in the market or the street. In reality, many West Af- rican migrants sell commodities. Others market African cultural goods to Cape Verdeans and tourists alike in the streets of Praia (Santiago) and Mindelo (São Vicente) and in the sandy hotspots of Sal and Boa Vista Islands, and many others work across a wide spectrum of economic activities. Despite their diff erent characteristics, none of the islands has a simple path to recognition or any easy route towards integration. Senegalese migrants might occupy an ever-so-slightly advantageous position in Cape Verde. Some were or are frontrunners of the successful Senegalese merchant diaspora, who have become de facto cultural brokers between the two neighbouring countries. Still others work in menial or occasional jobs in construction or cleaning, and in an array of other activities in the informal sector. Most of these jobs are precarious and quickly vanish in a weak economy, either because a large construction project is halted, or because a cleaning job previously held by an African woman is suddenly given to an unemployed Cape Verdean, upholding long-standing ties of solidarity. Covert and even overt xenophobia (with clear ethnic contours) aimed at mainland Africans is on the rise and is perhaps, as Bruce Baker posits, a notorious exception to Cape Verde’s apparent ethnic harmony (Baker 2006: 503–4). Interestingly, among educated or affl uent Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 121

Africans with access to visible fi nancial resources, the path to acceptance as a ‘worthy’ member of society seems to be eased. Th ese generally enter with higher social positions and are gradually integrated into local social networks. Th is applies to Angolans, for example, who share a common language and colonial past with Cape Verdeans and often arrive as skilled professionals. It does not, however, extend to Bissauans, whose country shares similar ethnic markers and even a former political union with Cape Verde. In this case, the ethno-racial indicator seems to play a strong role in determining the speed and level of acceptance and integration,5 but this role is a function of the socioeconomic indicator. Th ere seems to be little correlation between Cape Verde’s migratory narrative – an ideology of migration so central to the social fabric that it has become the national community’s central grammar (e.g. Carling and Åkesson 2009) – and its receptivity and tolerance towards immigrants. Th e country’s fabled hospitality towards strangers and foreigners, called morabeza, appears to be reserved for selected groups of people, reifying the idea that migrants’ physical appearance and perceived social class, entrance status and socioeconomic entry level are key indicators in defi ning ethnic integration, refl ecting a kind of migrant pedigree attributed to them and begetting diff erent degrees of receptivity. Th is fundamental discrepancy – between an ongoing renegotiation of national and ethnic identities on the one hand and the processes of material inclusion and exclusion on the other – highlights Cape Verde’s interest as a case study. Unlike other newcomers to the islands, Africans force the debate on identity – on what Cape Verde is and what it is not. Although Europeans carry the cultural load of a colonial past and have imported gentrifi cation and ‘space war’ issues to all four islands mentioned above – Santiago, São Vicente, Sal and Boa Vista –, their presence is equally aspirational, pushing the envelope of self-identifi cation with European habits and European economic success that have historically stomped Africanity out of the equation, at the symbolic level at least. Evidence suggests that, while quintessentially syncretic as a society, Cape Verdeans might tacitly regard their country as ‘more civilized’ than others on the mainland. Th e dimensions of this understanding are political, economic and social, but undoubtedly carry an ethno-racial undertone as well. Th us the European component of migrant stock is seen as familiar while the infl ow of African migrants is seen as alien.

Ghettos of Diﬀ erence, Illegality and (Not Much) Understanding Th e task of stopping undocumented immigration in Cape Verde will not be easier – or cheaper, for that matter – than it is in Europe, even when new resources are regularly added to the arsenal accessible to the state. It is, however, a fundamental predicament. At this juncture, Cape Verdean society is deeply divided between pan-African ideals of solidarity and somewhat understandable but un- justiﬁ ed apprehension. 122 Pedro F. Marcelino

Although the powerful imagery of rickety boats loaded with frightened, ex- hausted faces is as pervasive in local popular discourse as it is on international media, this is certainly not the only, and possibly not the most common, method of accessing the islands. Boats have, however, been intercepted or known to arrive at the islands of Sal, Boa Vista, and Maio (the three closest to the continent), while others are reported to have landed at São Vicente – the main transit hub for migrants attempting to reach the Canaries – and at the largely inaccessible and recessed Santo Antão. Th e desperation and bravery of these voyages does not go unnoticed by the average Cape Verdean. In almost every interview conducted in the streets of Min- delo, the country’s second largest city, Cape Verdeans of both genders, young and old, employed and unemployed, showed that they understood why African migrants seek the islands, as epitomized in this interviewee’s empathetic statement: ‘Th eir countries are in constant disarray, and that’s why they come to Cape Verde. We’re not rich, but at least life is peaceful here’. Yet because Africans follow the same internal migration routes that Cape Verdeans do, pressure inevitably falls on the same locations (see Figure 6.1). Boa Vista is a prime example of the dire consequences of these unregulated ﬂ ows and of the lack or preparation of local authorities. On this island, para- disiacal luxury hotels and aﬄ uent residential developments are surrounded by

Figure 6.1. (1) Internal migration routes and internal migration incentives; (2) irregular migration ship/zodiac routes from West Africa. Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 123 pristine sand dunes peppered with date trees. Once paraded as the country’s crown jewel, Boa Vista today boasts one of the highest costs of living in the country – fuelled by its tourism industry6 – and is beginning to exhibit ‘unexpected’ symptoms of social confl ict. Nowhere in the archipelago is the disparity between rich and poor as shocking as in this large, sparsely populated island. Almost every African who has landed, directly or indirectly, at Boa Vista has ended up segregated in the outlying shantytown of Barraca (which means ‘shanty’). Offi cial estimates in 2008 put the local population at over 3,000 and growing daily, but the actual number was thought to be closer to 4,000–4,500, mostly African migrants of undefi ned provenance and rural islanders from Santiago. In February 2010 a study ordered by the Ministry of Housing and Territorial Planning and conducted by the Cape Verdean consultancy fi rm AfroSondagem and the Labo- ratory for Civil Engineering revealed that the number of inhabitants was probably just around 2,800, dispelling fears that the migrant population was about to outnumber locals. Still, faced with few possibilities, the community is rife with unemployment, malnourishment, infectious diseases, alcoholism, drug abuse and drug traffi cking, as well as petty and violent criminality. Worryingly, and predictably, as the economic crisis settled in, violent criminality overfl owed the boundaries of this isolated ghetto into the island’s main urban centre, the small town of Sal-Rei, ‘risking’, according to local inhabitants, ‘spoiling Boa Vista’s positive image and damaging its tourism potential’ (Frederico 2010). Municipal authorities confess to not having the capability to resolve this urban time bomb – a fl agship case of immigration mismanagement. Meanwhile, much of the public discourse on Barraca to date seems to revolve around the consequences of negative projections to the exterior rather than focus on ongoing integration and exclusion processes.

All African, But Not So Fast: Contrasting Voices of Acceptance Since accurate fi gures on legal and illegal migrants are hard to obtain, it might be productive to step back from these limitations and observe the phenomenon from a diff erent vantage point to gain a better comparative understanding of the social landscape. Th e probabilistic framework I am thus proposing is admittedly based on a combination of partial statistical information, empirical observation and soft data from diff erent sources and time periods. Th is data, though surely stronger for some issues than for others, is suffi ciently compelling to put forward a tentative model. It does not constitute any type of defi nitive conclusion on the subject but rather serves as a preliminary graphic layout of these early fi ndings, intended to open up the debate on an issue that has not been adequately explored in this context. Th e model will require further proofi ng pending the availability of solid data, whether absolute numbers or feasible and methodologically sound statistical projections. Considering the attention both the Cape Verdean govern- 124 Pedro F. Marcelino ment and the EU are now aff ording to the issue of immigration, greater precision is expected and necessary from the extensive Population Census 2010, with results available later in the year. Th e integration/exclusion model (see Figure 6.2) suggests that there is a correlation between migrants’ occupation – or stereotyped (perceived) occupation – and nationality/ethnicity, and the level of acceptance, interaction, and tolerance of migrants in Cape Verdean society. Th e central part of the chart indicates the history of the community in Cape Verde, its main (perceived) occupation(s) and the relative social standing associated with it. Th e column on the right indicates diff erent levels of integration in the Cape Verdean social fabric. Th is is a uidfl continuum, variable across communities, even within each of them, and possibly across time periods, as there are always individuals who do not fi t a model, and must therefore be assumed to be exceptions that confi rm the rule. Following this model, some patterns emerge: positive perceptions of non- European foreigners appear to be stronger for communities that either are very small and thus not noticeable (e.g. Cubans) or have a long history of interaction and settlement in Cape Verde (e.g. Lebanese). Ethnicity does not seem to deter integration, although the case of continental African migrants appears to be an exception. Still, newcomers with a high professional status or substantial capital might be directly inducted into higher levels of acceptance, regardless of their ethnicity (e.g. Angolans). Education can, in fact, trump race, as the signifi cance of ‘black’ and ‘white’ in Creole as social rather than racial tropes suggests. Th ose coming from some Portuguese-speaking nations appear to have easier access to a ‘fast-track’ integration process. Hence, Angolans (despite their ethnicity) are fairly well integrated. Conversely, other African migrants – Bissauans perhaps excluded – generally have little personal contact with Cape Verdeans beyond simple interaction in a commercial setting. Th is establishes a strong nexus between their ethnicity and the petty occupations many take up while waiting for an opportunity to move towards Europe. Models based on interaction and occupation are not new, but they have not, to my knowledge, been applied to the Cape Verde case study. John W. Berry (2005) discusses social and psychological acculturation and the diff erent ways in which a group of newcomers negotiate their inclusion according to the nature of the migrant community’s relationship with the host community (he calls these ‘acculturation strategies’) (see also Berry 2010). More recently, Dennis Cordell (2008) discussed the paradoxes of the incorporation of Nigerians in the United States, resorting to a list of descriptors that include status, education, income and employment as relevant in the process of social exclusion. While Berry selects a vocabulary related to ‘acculturation stress’, Alejandro Portes (1995: 1–39) refers to categories of ‘hostile’, ‘non-hostile’ and ‘poorly integrated’ interaction. Tony Richmond (1994: 117–20) attempts a similar dia- gram of incorporation in his book Global Apartheid, proposing an operational Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 125 Tentative inclusion/exclusion model: (1) perceived professional activity, ethnicity and class; (2) level of integration in host society. of integration in host ethnicity and class; (2) level 6.2. Figure activity, professional model: (1) perceived inclusion/exclusion Tentative 126 Pedro F. Marcelino model of migration and occupational status. Th is builds on John Porter’s (1965: 68–91) earlier work on immigrants in post-World War II Canada, where he pro- posed the categories of ‘behavioural assimilation’ and ‘structural assimilation’, speaking of a correlation between ethnicity, entrance status, occupational roles and segregation. Th e present model instead puts forward a tentative vocabulary that might be more suitable to the Cape Verdean case: acceptance/integration; widespread interaction; limited interaction; no interaction/ostracism. In explaining this model, the particular case of Nigerians requires special mention. While most African migrants are subject to overt or covert discrimination in some fashion, public opinion on the subject appears to be dispropor- tionally negative towards Nigerian nationals. Not only did this initial study fi nd an abnormal reaction to the presence of Nigerians, their perceived dishonesty and their insinuated lack of a moral compass (Nigerians are often referred to as ‘traffi ckers’, ‘smugglers’ and ‘criminals’, as happens in much of Africa), but it also worryingly confi rmed the fi ndings of broader studies about Nigerian immigrant communities in both South Africa and the United States (Cordell 2008). Public perception thus currently appears to place Nigerians at the bottom of the migrant hierarchy. Senegal is the closest continental neighbour, and Guinea-Bissau an old political ally in the independence struggle, so unsurprisingly Senegalese and Bissauans are by far the largest foreign communities currently present in the country.7 Al- though the phrases those Senegalese and those Mandjako(s)8 are occasionally used pejoratively to refer to Africans in general – including Senegalese and Bissauans – a special acceptance seems to be reserved for these two national groups, particularly when compared to others, especially Nigerians. Th e following abundantly demonstrate this:

We don’t get much with Nigerians in our land. Th ey do not work and only bring trouble. We should defi nitely revise the [protocol for the] free movement of people within ECOWAS. Th e best would be to sign a protocol with Guinea Bissau and Senegal, with whom we have a common past, and get rid of those Nigerians.9 Fifteen out of ten Nigerians living here are traffi ckers. We usually gen- eralize and call the continental migrants Mandjakos, but the truth is that those Nigerians have nothing to do with the Bissauans or even the Senegalese. Th ose coming from Nigeria are here with the express intent of developing the powerful Nigerian mafi a.10 A woman from Mali, a man from Nigeria, others from Ghana, and elsewhere in ECOWAS, are caught every day in Cape Verde and taken to court for criminal acts. Is it not time to opt out of that treaty and forbid the entrance of these Muslim, criminal strangers…?11 Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 127

If Nigerians [denounce criminal elements within their national community] they will all end up in jail. Amokaki denounces Ammuneke, Ammuneke denounces Yekkiki, Yekkiki denounces Amokaki and so on. We would need a (really) big jail for Nigerians alone.12

Interestingly, Senegalese interviewees in the streets of Praia and Mindelo cautiously detached themselves from Nigerian migrants in their own statements, claiming that they ‘look for confusion’ and thus Senegalese must not be seen as socializing with them. When asked about criminality among the African community, a male Senegalese interviewee in Mindelo vehemently stated that ‘Sene- galese are diff erent from Nigerians’, making sure this separation was clear to the author/interviewer. It is diffi cult to speculate on the reasons for these and many similar comments. Regional grievances, such as Nigeria’s size, affl uence and political and economic dominance in Upper Guinea, as well as its proactive intervention in political af- fairs across the region, could perhaps explain some suspiciousness towards Nige- rian nationals, transplanted to a new geography. Yet the scope of these comments suggests that Senegalese either genuinely assume that Nigerians in Cape Verde are involved in informal and illegal activities, or simply that they understand and have appropriated the mistrust for Nigerians among Cape Verdeans. If the latter is true, then this eagerness to adapt and conform to the host society’s rules would appear to be happening in the interest of self-preservation. I suggest both aspects, and possibly more, play a role. Assembling a collection of ideas that capture common perceptions of and suspicions about continental African migrants in Cape Verde becomes a revealing exercise, once underlying assumptions have been teased out. Th ree key issues stood out in interviews with Cape Verdeans on possible reasons for these negative perceptions: language barriers, extreme cultural diff erences and the vast increase in urban criminality (particularly in Praia and Mindelo but also, as noted before, in Boa Vista). Th ese arguments can be deconstructed fairly simply. First, although language is factually a communication barrier with some Africans, many urban Cape Verdeans speak enough French or English to ensure that minimal exchanges happen. Moreover, the fact that a migrant learns the language of the host does not automatically open the door to integration. Second, many cultural traits are indeed profoundly diff erent – despite the proximity, they are mostly new to a majority of Cape Verdeans, which could explain a skewed perception based on lack of contact and knowledge. Finally, although criminality rates are certainly rapidly increasing, there seems to be little to no correlation between crime and foreign population. Still, whenever the media run a story on a drug bust involving an African, the discourse on online comment boards quickly veers towards the xenophobic, often ignoring the case at hand and generalizing to other cases and the African community at large. 128 Pedro F. Marcelino

Some Cape Verdeans, however, have started to react against this situation, broadening the debate on identity, pan-Africanism, immigration and criminality, as the following statements show:

Foreigners in Cape Verde must be counted … identifi ed [and] remain in Cape Verde following the approval of immigration authorities. … If we start marginalizing foreign residents like this, we will aggravate the situation.13 It’s high time Cape Verdean people stopped with these racist comments. Th ose of us who live abroad feel discrimination in our skin, [but] I am proud of my colour. Th is is what is happening to our African brothers in Cape Verde. … Why would a people who suff ered and suff ers so much discrimination discriminate against its own brothers?14 What’s this [behaviour] all about? Why assume that every Nigerian is a traffi cker? We should not be closing our eyes to what is in front of us: we have youth delinquents that need to be punished. Let’s not pretend it’s not there just because the victim is Nigerian and the perpetrator Cape Verdean.15

Th ese statements in online comment boards were, with few exceptions, matched by statements heard in interviews in several cities in Cape Verde, particularly among younger citizens. Older Cape Verdeans seemed less inclined to support the presence of continental African immigrants, but this study was not broad enough to extrapolate to the generality of the national population. It is likely, I argue, that the dominant, agglutinating nature of a Creole culture that has assimilated and synthesized others in the past simply met, in Upper Guinea Africans, an obstacle that it cannot quite cope with or process in the way it was used to doing. Lacking recent experience in dealing with large migrant groups from Af- rica, it is possible that Cape Verdeans are simply at a loss. Perhaps time will settle the dust – or perhaps not.

Conclusions Cape Verde’s identity and sovereignty challenges are currently introducing a unique precedent in its history. Social issues resulting from irregular immigration and the pressure of being at the forefront of the ‘new’ European border reﬂ ect symptoms parallel to those in southern European countries in the context of similar transformations in the 1970s and 1980s. Th is chapter concludes that the increasingly extemporaneous nature of European external policy not only constitutes a reassembly and reconstruction of the whole Mediterranean region, technically testing the extension of its borders towards the western edge of the Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 129

African continent, but is also simultaneously transferring many of the political predicaments and social disturbances of the borderland to buff er countries such as Cape Verde. In assigning the security of its own territorial waters to foreign powers, Cape Verde is complying with a foreign immigration policy in which it has no say. However, it is also, perhaps strategically, ensuring a direct line of contact with EU. Given that it has been involuntarily transformed into a buff er zone, one could also cynically suggest that local authorities might take a veiled interest in maintaining a semi-continuous stream of migrants, a sine qua non condition to guaranteeing the continuation and reinforcement of its close connection and in- dispensability to the EU, particularly its southern states. At a time of substantial diffi culties with border and visa control enforcements, it remains unknown what the future of Cape Verde’s engagement with ECOWAS and the EU will be, and how will the two interact. Geopolitically, the West African coast between Mo- rocco and the Cape Verde islands might now be understood as en extension of the Mediterranean Sea directly under the EU’s sphere of infl uence. Cape Verde’s recently announced state-of-the-art radar system, fi nanced by Spain and geographically oriented to protect its interests, seems to suggest as much. A crucial need, however, subsists: regularizing and integrating resident migrants is an urgent matter requiring policymaking that tackles questions of inclusion and exclusion as well as social issues exported by Europe’s external policy and proxy maritime borderland in Cape Verdean waters. Internally, the problem lies in maintaining social peace at a time when the country has started to feel the pinch of fast economic development unaccompanied by a gradual shoring up of social democracy. Th e ongoing ghettoization of continental African migrancy in Cape Verde, as exemplifi ed by the shantytown of Barraca, follows multiple processes of gentrifi - cation, diff erentiation and exclusion that constrain individuals’ mental transition from self-declared ‘understanding’ to ‘tolerance’ or ‘acceptance’.16 Pinpointing where Cape Verdeans’ feelings about immigration truly lie is a challenge, without a wide-scope opinion survey. Still, the available data might permit one to conjec- ture, after Arjun Appadurai, that the answer might lie somewhere between the two linked co-factors of globalization and extreme resentment of minorities. I argue that two fears might join this line of thought within a common nexus: the fear of dilution of identity, and the fear of socioeconomic subalternization and loss. Appadurai (2006: 83) notes that ‘majorities can always be mobilized to think that they are in danger of becoming minor (culturally or numerically) and to fear that minorities, conversely, can easily become major.’ Th e fear of dilution of identity illustrated by this statement is perhaps equally compounded by current events across Europe and on Cape Verde’s own shores, where the occasional boatload of undocumented migrants moors, building on ideas of ‘invasion by boat’. At the other end of the spectrum, and consistent with Appadurai’s thought 130 Pedro F. Marcelino that ‘globalization intensifi es the possibility of this volatile morphing’ (Appadurai 2006: 83), the fear of socioeconomic loss is clearly intersected by multiple variables, namely the growing diffi culty of emigrating from Cape Verde, associated with the global economic crisis and the general aggravation of the cost of living in the country. Appadurai perhaps captures it best when he implies that the root of the tension ‘has much to do with the strange inner reciprocity of the categories of “majority” and “minority” in liberal social thought, which produces what Ap- padurai (2006: 8) calls the anxiety of incompleteness. Perhaps there is, then, an ongoing dialogue between sociocultural and socioeconomic factors, although the threat of raw xenophobia and possibly even discrimination based on ethno-racial identities cannot be discounted as contributors to this debate.17 Here we are reminded of how the overall fabric of a society suff ers long-term eff ects from a type of colonialism that Ashis Nandy has claimed colonizes the mind (Nandy 2006: xi), as well as spatiality, discrimination and structures of inequality, through forms of segregation. Th e Nigerian scholar Claude Aké notes that ‘it is one of the problems of the state-building project in multinational societies of Africa that in seeking to integrate it has instead produced disintegration’ by creating a ‘multiplicity of interpretative communities which, despite their subordination to central power, remain sharply and consciously diff erentiated by their cognitive maps, political practice and political morality’ (Aké 1995: 72). In this manner, arguably, the ghettos described earlier become as normalized as they are feared. Th e ghetto, wrote Albert Memmi (2006: 84), ‘is both a rejection and a reaction to rejections, real or imagined, by the others. [It] supports and feeds the separation, but it is also its expression’. In extreme cases, fear might give way to the infamous suggestion that a form of segregation should be safeguarded. Th is is perhaps the case with the recently circulated idea that the shantytown of Barraca in Boa Vista ought to be fenced off – allegedly following suggestions by the residents themselves (see e.g. Frederico 2008). Considering these acute tensions, the fast-changing ethnoscape of the country probably justifi es more aggressive measures to strengthen social justice. It also requires that the offi cial approach to immigration move forward from its current single focus on Cape Verdeans living overseas to proactively develop a comprehensive and sovereign immigration policy. What the current context does not justify, however, are the exaggerated discourses of ‘invasion’, criminality and dilution of identity advanced by the media, articulated even by infl uential political and academic fi gures, and reproduced by many ordinary Cape Verdeans. Th is discourse currently seems to apply exclusively to African migrants (Angolans excepted), while Chinese, Europeans and even Brazilians are all generally seen as bringing technical and economic advantages to the country. Th is murky cocktail of ethno-racial and socioeconomic reasons suggests a hybrid type of discrimination that, being thus far unaddressed by the Cape Verdean government, is easily Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 131

ﬁ nding resonance among Cape Verdean people based on the ‘fear of invasion’. Appadurai (2006) dubs this ‘the fear of small numbers’ – the majority’s irrational fear of becoming subjugated by a diminutive minority.

Pedro F. Marcelino is a researcher, political analyst and policy consultant af- ﬁ liated with Longyearbyen Consulting of Toronto, Canada. He has worked on migrant rights, border narratives and peace and security issues. Key publications include ‘Transitional African Spaces in Comparative Analysis’ (with Hermon Farahi), in Political Civility in the Middle East (Routledge, 2011); Si proches et si lointaines (ed.) (Observatory on Migration, 2013); and the upcoming ‘Liminal- ity and Migrant Decision-Making in the Aftermath of the Political and Refugee Crises in the Mediterranean, 2010–2013’, in Movers and Stayers: Sub-Saharan Migration Decisions and Changing Conditions in the Mediterranean (forthcoming in 2015). As a documentary ﬁ lmmaker, he directed After the War: Memoirs of Exile (2014).

Notes 1. Th is contribution is based on a paper presented at the Upper Guinea Conference, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, in Halle, Germany. As of 2010 the Cape Verdean government has – predictably – rethought the immigration, resettlement and free movement of people clauses in the guiding ECOWAS agreements, and eschewed the possibility of integrating the advance group of countries using the new ECOWAS biometric passports (backed by Ghana and set to gradually replace individual member states’ national passports). Interestingly, this policy-based distancing happened despite the current government’s pan-African stance and its continued involvement in regional politics (as epitomized by President Pedro Pires’ intervention in the Côte d’Ivoire crisis in late 2010). 2. Th e subject of an idealized racial blindness in the Cape Verde islands has been explored in Deirdre Meintel’s (1984) work. She previously touched upon the subject in earlier works, including Meintel Machado (1981). 3. For a full set of studies on motivations for migration, refer to the joint project EUM- AGINE: Imagining Europe from the Outside, run by the Centre of Sociological Research (CSR) in Ternopil, Ukraine; the Centre for Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and the International Migration Institute (IMI), both in Oxford, United Kingdom; the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in Norway; Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey; Université Checikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAD) in Senegal; Université Mohammed V-Agdal in Rabat, Morocco; and the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (Ce- MIS) in Antwerp, Belgium. Also see www.eumagine.org. 4. It should be noted that Cape Verde’s immigration law was ﬁ nally passed in 2012, as was a national strategy on migration. Th ese have established themselves as core documents among a portfolio that includes limited mobility treatises with both the EU and ECOWAS. Th e category of asylum continues to be unregulated by internal laws. No refugees are registered as such in oﬃ cial national statistics, although the country has on occasion agreed to receive individuals with sensitive politics (i.e. people accused of Basque 132 Pedro F. Marcelino

terrorism and former Guantanamo prisoners), in ad hoc negotiations. Temporary (or circular) migration of West Africans is theoretically possible in light of the ECOWAS agreements, and business/investment travel or migration is facilitated by specifi c regulations. For lower-income migrants, opportunities to enter the country legally are scarce. 5. For a complete discussion of the ethnic and racial dimensions of migration in Cape Verde, see especially Marcelino (2013). 6. Th e country’s fi rst fi ve-star hotel, a 750-room mammoth, opened on the island in January 2011. 7. Independence leader Amílcar Cabral was a Bissau-Guinean of Cape Verdean stock. 8. Referred to indistinctively of the specifi city of this mainland ethnic group. 9. Reader comment (Acut) published in an online forum following the publication of an article about two Nigerian citizens detained in Sal Island for dealing crack (1 April 2009), in A Semana Online (www.asemana.publ.cv). 10. Reader comment (Mandjako Criolo), in A Semana Online, 01 April 2009. 11. Reader comment (Miss Universo), published in an online forum following the publication of an article about a Malian woman apprehended while traffi cking cocaine (26 February 2010), in A Semana Online. 12. Reader comment (CEDEAonde, or roughly ‘ECOwhat’), published in an online forum following the publication of an article on the arrest and trial in the Sal of the Nigerian national Onochie Francis Obaziek for drug traffi c (10 March 2010), in A Semana Online. 13. Reader comment (Pedro António), published in an online forum, following the publication of an article about two Nigerian citizens detained in Sal Island for dealing crack (1 April 2009). It is worth noting that all the positive comments are signed by readers identifi ed with a full name, rather than the anonymous, sheltering nickname that is generally the case with negative comments. 14. Reader comment (Madil), published in an online forum, following the publication of an article on a robbery in Sal (19 February 2010), in A Semana Online. 15. Reader comment (Aramis), in A Semana Online. 16. Th ough clearly not a feature unique to Cape Verde, this is as relevant as it is prolifi c. For other cases, see e.g. Min Sook Lee’s fi lm El Contrato (www.nfb.ca/fi lm/el_contrato), a 2003 short documentary on Mexican contract workers in Canada, where southern On- tario employers and residents employ similarly suggestive vocabulary, such as: ‘I understand … but,’ or ‘I know they’re human too, and I’m not racist or anything, but…’. 17. Ultimately, such ‘colonial racism’ could be a sad remnant of Cape Verde’s past and its very prominent postcolonial present, as Franz Fanon (2006) implied about the typical post-colony, albeit in another geographical context that nonetheless shares the postcolonial creolized subject with Cape Verde. On the issue of migrant ‘invasion’ or ‘fl ood’, see De Haas (2008).

References Afrobarometer. 2004. Afrobarometer Round 2: Compendium of Comparative Results from a 15-Country Survey. Pretoria, Accra and East Lansing, MI: Afrobarometer. Aké, C. 1995: ‘Th e Democratization of Disempowerment in Africa’, in J. Hippler (ed.), Th e Democratization of Disempowerment. London: Pluto Press, pp. 70–89. Appadurai, A. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. Baker, B. 2006. ‘Cape Verde: Th e Most Democratic Nation in Africa?’, Journal of Modern African Studies 44(4): 503–4. Th e African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands 133

Berry, J.W. 2005. ‘Acculturation: Living Successfully in Two Cultures’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations 29(6): 697–712. ———. 2010. ‘Immigrant Acculturation: Psychological and Social Adaptations’, unpublished manuscript. Carling, J., and L. Åkesson. 2009. ‘Mobility at the Heart of a Nation: Patterns and Meanings of Cape Verdean Migration’, International Migration 47(3): 123–55. Cordell, D. 2008. ‘Paradoxes of Immigrant Incorporation’, in T. Falola and N. Afolabi (eds), Trans-Atlantic Migration: Th e Paradoxes of Exile. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 14–22. Davidson, B. 1989. Th e Fortunate Isles: A Study on African Transformation. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. De Haas, H. 2008. Irregular Migration from West Africa to the Maghreb and the European Union: An Overview of Recent Trends, IOM Migration Research Series 32. Geneva: In- ternational Organization for Migration. Retrieved in 2010 from http://www.iom.int/ja hia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/shared/mainsite/published_docs/serial_publications/ MRS-32_EN.pdf. DeParle, J. 2007. ‘Border Crossings: In a World on the Move, a Tiny Land Strains to Cope’. Th e New York Times (online edition), 24 June 2007. Retrieved 23 October 2014 from http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/world/africa/24verde.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Economist Intelligence Unit. 2008. Country Profi le: Cape Verde Republic. London: Th e Econ- omist Intelligence Unit. Fanon, F. 2006. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Foster, C. 2010. ‘Racial Democracy and Offi cial Multiculturalism: Ontologies of Blackness in Brazil, the United States and Canada’, Conference on Rethinking Multiculturalism: Brazil, Canada and the United States, 29–30 January 2010. Toronto: CERLAC, York University. Frederico, S. 2008. ‘Barraca Passada a Pente Fino’, A Semana (Praia, Cape Verde), 21 Novem- ber 2008, p. 4. ———. 2010. ‘Boa Vista: Estudo Desmistifi ca o Bairro da Barraca’, Correio das Ilhas (Praia, Cape Verde), 26 February 2010. Retrieved 23 October 2014 from http://www.asemana .publ.cv/spip.php?article50377. Góis, P. 2005. ‘Low Intensity Transnationalism: Th e Cape Verdean Case’, Stichproben – Wiener Zeitschrift Für Kritische Afrikastudien 5(8): 255–76. International Fund for Agricultural Development. 2006. Ouevrer pour que les Ruraux Pauvres se Libérent de la Pauvreté au Cap-Vert. Rome: International Fund for Agricultural De- velopment. Marcelino, P.F. 2009. ‘Postcolonial Identity, Transition and Challenges to National Identity in Cape Verde’, Articulate – Undergraduate Research Applied to International Development 2(2): 56–62. ———. 2013. O Novo Paradigma Migratório dos Espaços de Trânsito Africanos: Inclusão, exclu- são, vidas precárias e competição por recursos escassos em países tampão – o caso de Cabo Verde. Praia, Cape Verde: Corubal Editora and Bissau, Guinea-Bissau: Ilhéu Editora. Meintel, D. 1984. Race, Culture and Portuguese Colonialism in Cabo Verde, Foreign and Com- parative Studies/African Series 41. Syracuse, NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Pub- lic Aff airs, Syracuse University. Meintel Machado, D. 1981. ‘Cape Verdean Americans’, in J. Rollins (ed.), Hidden Minorities: Th e Persistence of Ethnicity in American Life. Washington, DC: University Press of Amer- ica, pp. 233–56. Memmi, A. 2006. Decolonization and the Decolonized. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 134 Pedro F. Marcelino

Nandy, A. 2006. Th e Intimate Enemy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nieswand, B. 2011. Th eorizing Transnational Migration: Th e Status Paradox of Migration. New York and London: Routledge. Porter, J. 1965. Th e Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Portes, A. 1995. ‘Th e Economic Sociology of Immigration: An Overview’, in A. Portes (ed.), Th e Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays on Networks, Ethnicity and Entrepeneurship. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 1–39. Richmond, A. 1994. Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism and the New World Order. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Sánchez Gibau. G. 2008. ‘Cape Verdean Diasporic Identity Formation’, in L. Batalha and J. Carling (eds), Transnational Archipelago: Perspectives on Cape Verdean Migration and Dias- pora. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 255–68. Chapter 7 Celebrating Asymmetries Creole Stratiﬁ cation and the Regrounding of Home in Cape Verdean Migrant Return Visits Heike Drotbohm

Introduction Hora di Bai Time of Departure Se bem é doce, If return is sweet Bai é maguado; departure is bitter Mas, se ka bado, but, who does not leave Ka ta birado! cannot return Se no morrê na despedida, if we die in the moment of goodbye Nhor des na volta at the moment of our return Ta dano bida. god will revive us. —Eugenio Tavares1

Th is chapter deals with the ritualized event of return migration in the West Afri- can island state of Cape Verde. Once a central node of transatlantic exchange and connectedness, this country has over time drifted to the margins of global interest, particularly since the abolition of slavery. As in many other places that had been part of these transatlantic entanglements, this historical change resulted in the symbolic revaluation of return migration and in a fusion of mobility, identity and the status of a person. As is told in the Cape Verdean morna2 quoted above, only those who left can return and therewith become fully accepted members of this transnational society. Despite the heterogeneity of the return migrants of the twenty-fi rst century, who return to their country of origin as tourists, successful investors, relaxed pensioners, disillusioned migrants or deportees, os retornados, as the returnees are called, by and large enjoy a good reputation. As will become clear in the fol- 136 Heike Drotbohm lowing, in countries considerably shaped by a transnational livelihood, diff erent types of diasporic return reveal various political, economic, symbolic and social motives. Above all, recent shifts in the global economy have caused an increase in return migration, and its impact has become highly visible in the countries most involved in international migration. Accordingly, remigration has received more and more scholarly attention (Duval 2004; Markowitz and Stefansson 2004; Conway 2005; Harper 2005; Tsuda 2009). Whereas these studies mainly deal with the social background and conditions of return migration, understood as voluntary and complete, this essay examines the ritualized event of migrant return visits and those encounters between visiting migrants and the nonmigrant island population. In the following discussion I employ the concept of ‘home’ as an entry into the nexus between diff erent kinds of belonging, using it to frame the dynamics of social relations, identity and locality. I base my interpretation of return visits on the theoretical premise that ‘home’ is at once an idea and a social construction as well as a place. Seen this way, ‘home’ builds on experiences of social continuity and solidarity but also implies processes of diff erentiation, inequality and enforcement. In this regard I refer to the theoretical framework developed by Sara Ahmed and her colleagues in the introduction to their book Uprootings/ Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration:

Uprootings and regroundings emerge from this collective work as simultaneously aﬀ ective, embodied, cultural and political processes whose eﬀ ects are not simply given. For example, regroundings – of identity, culture, nation, diaspora – can both resist and reproduce hegemonic forms of home and belonging. (Ahmed et al. 2003: 2)

I intend to show that this labour of ‘regrounding home’ is not only a diasporic project but also involves those who have never left Cape Verde yet nonetheless contribute in their own way to the meaning and reconstruction of ‘home’. I will examine this hypothesis by focusing on a particular kind of migrant return, that is, those returns prompted by patron saint festivities, which annually bring thousands of migrants to their country of origin. Despite the fact that this particular type of Cape Verdean return visit constitutes a crucial link within the transnational fi eld connecting the local peasant community to life in diff erent sites of the Cape Verdean diaspora, its content and meaning have not received suffi cient scholarly attention.3 Here the banderona da Campanas de Baixo (hereafter banderona), a festivity carried out every year in the rural north of the Cape Verdean island of Fogo, will be analysed with respect to the interaction between groups of people who consider themselves part of the same social structure but live in diff erent places around the world and thus must negotiate diff erent interests, roles and positions. Celebrating Asymmetries 137

My observations are based on twelve months of anthropological ﬁ eldwork, carried out between 2006 and 2008 on the islands of Fogo and Brava and in Bos- ton, Massachusetts and in Lisbon, Portugal. Th is ﬁ eldwork was conducted as part of a larger research project examining the quality of transnational family relations. In addition to conventional techniques of qualitative social research and network analysis, the integration of my own family life into the local community of Sao Filipe, interviews in transnational households, and visits to the other islands and to family members living in the diaspora were key to understanding divergent perspectives. To examine the social meaning of the banderona in this context, in 2007 I participated in the course of events related to the banderona in the village of Campanas, which is part of the Concelo Galineiro in the north of Fogo. I further grounded my observations through a subsequent stay in the same village.

Mobility, Return and Social Stratifi cation in Cape Verdean History Th e two islands of Fogo and Brava lie at the south-western tip of the Cape Verdean archipelago and belong to the group referred to as the Sotavento (‘under the wind’). With the larger neighbouring island of Santiago they are part of the so-called ‘plantation complex’ (Curtin 1990) that in the course of Portuguese colonialism introduced a creole society on these nine formerly uninhabited islands (Carreira 1982). Although the arid climate precluded the establishment of an extensive sugar industry, Cape Verdean ethnogenesis is based on the asymmetric encounter and miscegenation of Portuguese traders and landowners (morgados) and Africans deported from the west coast of the continent. In this context Wil- son Trajano Filho underlines the crucial signifi cance of the mobility of individual Cape Verdeans, who from the early phase of the archipelago’s settlement served to overcome challenges such as resource scarcity and political confl icts (Trajano Filho 2009: 524). Th ose individuals were responsible for integrating themselves as lançados (literally the thrown-out ones) into transatlantic trading networks and eventually gained economic capital, prestige and infl uence through traffi cking in slaves, salt, rice, textiles and European-manufactured objects (Meintel 1984; Ro- drigues 2003). As in other parts of the Senegambia, there gradually developed a creole social structure that even today is based on a discursive perception of ‘race’ and class as key markers of social diff erentiation. By the end of the eighteenth century life on the islands, shaped by increasing overpopulation, supply crises and devastating famines, was managed by combining local subsistence farming and fi shing with strategic networking with coastal areas around the Atlantic Rim. More than in other areas of West Africa, national history in Cape Verde is shaped by collective eff orts of integration into global labour market networks, much like what occurred in the islands of the Caribbean. In this phase migration became established as a family or household strategy to take advantage of the global inequality of diff erent economic systems. Men in 138 Heike Drotbohm particular availed themselves of the opportunity to work in European or North American agriculture or industry in order to sustain the family members left behind (Halter 1993; Rodrigues 2008: 354). From the beginning of the 1960s this option also became realistic for women, many of whom found jobs as domestic workers in Europe or the United States (Grassi 2007). Today, the Cape Verdean diaspora,4 which comprises more than fi ve hundred thousand people (Carling and Åkesson 2009), outnumbers the population remaining in the country of origin, and it seems impossible to fi nd a person in Cape Verde who does not have personal contacts beyond the islands. However, a closer look at the inner consistency of this society reveals that it is not simply the contact itself, but the type and quality of the contact that factors decisively into the islanders’ livelihood. On Fogo and Brava, which due to their altitude receive more rain than the eastern islands and off er comparatively amenable conditions for farming, most households combine gardening and fi shing with seasonal wage labour and migrant remittances. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, agriculture had the greater signifi cance for local economies, and patron/client relations between local families were crucial to their position and economic survival. Today alliances between local households are still cultivated – for instance, in the form of foster relations, the daily mobility of children between poorer and wealthier households, or through the exchange of crops or prepared food. Yet it is the intensity of contacts with the diaspora that contributes to the local diff erentiation between a precarious and a comfortable way of life (Drotbohm 2009). Although only a minority of the population receives money regularly, even intermittent amounts contribute to a higher quality of life, as they are used for irregular expenses that the poorer segments of society in particular can hardly aff ord otherwise (Åkesson 2009). Due to this established eff ect of the diaspora on local living conditions, social stratifi cation is shaped not only by the common patterns of creoleness but also by the dynamics and the transnationalization of social inequalities, which develop between those who are actively integrated into transnational networks and those whose connections are fragile. As in many other regions shaped by transnational migration, return visits are an important means of articulating or strengthening the liveliness of social relations that transgress national boundaries. In addition to spiritual or religious rituals, life-cycle rituals such as baptism, marriage and funerals off er welcome occasions to reconfi rm familial solidarity and reorder social belonging, which has been transformed due to great spatial and temporal distances (Fog Olwig 2002; Gard- ner and Grillo 2002; Drotbohm 2010). Transnational studies on the meaning of return visits have mainly concentrated on the migrants while largely ignoring the interests of the communities of origin. In adopting a transnational perspective to understand social encounters in the context of the patron saint festivities, it seems appropriate to examine return visits and the joint realization of the banderona as Celebrating Asymmetries 139 the collective endeavour to reconstruct a ‘home’. Th is endeavour may take on dif- ferent shapes and meanings for diff erent groups of actors but nonetheless enacts ‘the processes, modes and materialities of uprooting and regroundings’ (Ahmed et al. 2003: 2). Th e following sections therefore discuss temporality and processes within transnational social fi elds that not only recall social relations as they were (before departure) but revive the present (in the moment of the actual encounter) and try to envision a future that may still prove valuable for those involved.

Cartographies of Social and Mobile Diff erences In this examination of patron saint festivities, the construction of two social groups – ‘migrants’ and ‘nonmigrant islanders’ – will be contrasted. Th is simplifying classifi cation refers to the ‘strategic essentialism’, as described by Gayatri Spivak5 for capturing the manoeuvring of actors who make strategic use of essentializing categories in moments of social diff erentiation. However, this does not intend to suggest that these categories refl ect fi xed and clear-cut social formations. Many individuals belonging to this transnational social fi eld would not fi t clearly into one of these categories: traders and businessmen, for instance, constantly travel but also cultivate a permanent presence on the islands. Pensioners are another example: because the right to re-entry is often linked to the length of stay abroad, some of them have lost their right to circular migration, but despite these mobility restrictions they still identify themselves as migrants. Th e two groups – ‘migrants’ and ‘nonmigrants’ – should rather be viewed as ‘social constructions and moral imaginations’ (Malkki 1996: 382) produced by social encounters with mobility. In addition to this heterogeneity, migrants also belong to diff erent professional and status groups and foster diff erent kinds of attachments to their country of origin or to the diaspora. While some visitors return to the islands to strengthen their social bonds, update their knowledge and identify changes in the lives of their relatives, others see their stay on the islands as a kind of vacation, expressing the desire to relax at a distance from the everyday stresses of their diasporic existence and instead enjoy their diasporic achievements. Return visits also can be part of an ‘ethnic’ marriage market, inviting migrants to return and connect to those who intend to migrate but have not yet succeeded in doing so. Especially visitors who belong to the so-called second or third generation of Cape Verdean migrants living in the diaspora may use the occasion of a return journey to their parents’ or grandparents’ home country to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with it, improve their Cape Verdean creole, and simply enjoy days at the beach. According to Loretta Baldassar, members of the following generations often reorient themselves towards their migrant parents’ culture of origin in order to understand their own cultural and social background as territorially bounded. In these moments of return migration, a village can become a key place of cultural identity (Baldassar 2001). 140 Heike Drotbohm

Not all migrants return though. Some migrants have no interest in getting involved in their country of origin, perhaps even viewing any social ties to relatives who stayed behind as burdensome. Others cannot return; they may lack the ﬁ nancial wherewithal to do so, be unable to travel long distances, or have an undocumented residence status in the diaspora. Due to this heterogeneity, a return visit is always both an expression of capabilities and the result of individual decision making. Hence, both migrants and nonmigrants often perceive return visits as illuminating the intensity of migrant solidarities and the quality of their ties to the country of origin.

Re-membering Th ose Abroad In current times the realization and performance of the banderona cannot be imagined without the involvement of the diaspora. It follows a ‘transnational division of ritual space’ (Salih 2002), connecting persons from both sides of the Atlantic who contribute to the preparation of the celebration. To understand the inner workings of this transnational ritual, one fi rst needs to know that being the festeiro, the banderona’s main sponsor, is perceived and expressed as an important privilege. Th ough a local festivities committee composed exclusively of nonmigrants chooses and announces the festeiro for the coming year at the end of the preceding banderona, over the last twenty years the position of festeiro has been delegated solely to migrants, and not, as one might expect, to wealthy locals. As a rule, requests from migrantes and their kin who have a legitimate interest in carrying out the banderona are suffi cient. Th at said, the honour cannot be given to just anybody – a festeiro or his family is supposed to have descended from the village of Campanas and must also have the fi nancial resources to carry out the festivities appropriately. Disagreements usually arise during this selection, revolv- ing around which family the next sponsor should belong to or whether the family relations between the candidate and the locality are considered acceptably close. Th e festeiro of 2007 received the honour of ‘taking the fl ag’ after his name was submitted for the third time. He had strengthened his chances by way of friendly visits to Campanas, his active participation in the festivities over three consecutive years and his ability to mobilize generous sums. Th e islanders are well aware that migrants have a strong interest in the position of the festeiro. Each year the local committee must assess who has a legitimate interest in the position and who articulates this interest the most eff ectively. As in the case of the festeiro of 2007, rejecting an aspirant’s request in one year does not preclude the same aspirant in subsequent years; rather, the rejected aspirant often intensifi es his eff orts by increasing his visits, collecting higher donation amounts and expanding his level of social networking. With regard to fi nancial expectations, the honour of festeiro goes hand in hand with the duty, while away from the islands, to organize several fundraising activities during the preparatory year, such as a tombola and several Celebrating Asymmetries 141 sponsor dinners, with the aim of mobilizing additional sponsors and obtaining larger sums to send to Cape Verde.6 One may wonder at this point why migrants are willing to shoulder the costs, burdens and responsibilities of the banderona. Many Cape Verdean migrants, for diff erent reasons, value the festivities as an occasion for a return visit, yet many hesitate to become the festeiro due to the enormous fi nancial and organizational demands. However, when analysing this kind of prestige or merit festivity, one should not focus solely on the organizing participants. A closer look reveals that not only the returnees but also the island population articulate a clear interest and exert discernible pressure on their diasporic kin to carry out the banderona. Being related to a future festeiro fi rst of all alters the local position of the family to which the festeiro is connected, since the organization of the banderona is done on a family basis. In the course of the preparatory year, the festeiro remains in continuous contact with the committee as well as with his kin living on the island, who regularly are informed of the amount of money raised and are consulted about the allocation of these sums. At the same time, the festeiro’s kin on the island are in charge of collecting money and food donations, planning and coordinating the preparation of the dishes, and deciding on the working groups (cooks, assistants, etc.) who will produce the feast. In this preparatory phase it becomes obvious that the banderona, like similar celebrations in Latin American peasant communities, constitutes an important element in the design and confi rmation of local structures of solidarity and cooperation. Lynn Walter (1981), for instance, describes an equivalent procedure in Ecuador and illustrates the generalized reciprocity as it plays out over the course of the festivities, which can result in relations of cooperation but also exacerbate social hierarchies. Similarly, in Cape Verde the position of those households in close contact with the festeiro is heightened. Th eir members serve as local key persons and enjoy the privilege of deciding upon and distributing diff erent functions and resources, which are also viewed as income-generating activities. Hence, those involved in the banderona’s execution foster local alliances that will be to their continued advantage beyond the event itself, for instance in the context of local politics or when hiring local labour forces. Comparable to the tabanca, a semireligious network of solidarity on the neighbouring island of Santiago (Trajano Filho 2009: 528), the banderona helps to lay the foundation for a cooperative structure that prescribes solidarity and support not only during labour-intensive periods of agriculture but also during life crises, such as diseases or funerals, as well as on such occasions as weddings or the construction of a house. As the days of the banderona approach, charter fl ights and boats arrive from Lisbon, Porto, Paris, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Boston. In this way the festivities bring together Cape Verdeans from across the Cape Verdean diaspora, therefore constituting an occasion to meet not only relatives and friends living on the islands but also those living in other countries. For some migrants this is a 142 Heike Drotbohm convenient alternative to making visits to several diff erent countries to meet relatives living in other world areas, whereas others, due to fi nancial, political or visa constraints, lack access to the other countries and thus depend on such events in Cape Verde. In these moments of arrival, it becomes clear that besides responding to ‘local’ interests, as described above, the banderona also serves as an occasion for fostering transnational social relations. Th e island population makes eff orts to host as many visitors as possible, who arrive from neighbouring islands as well as foreign countries. Hosting guests from abroad is seen as an opportunity to foster or initiate social contacts, and hence becomes part of the fl ow of people, goods and information that connects the island with the rest of the archipelago and its surrounding world. Since these interests usually are communicated effi ciently, visitors arriving from the diaspora are expected to bear the considerable cost of additional baggage in order to provide gifts such as clothes, table and bed linens, and whatever else is necessary to ensure their family and friends are well equipped during the feast days. Consequently, before and during the festivities, it is not only the migrants who stand out from the local island population – the people related to migrants likewise set themselves apart by means of their newly received trendy clothes and jewellery. Th e younger generation in particular appreciates this practice: several times a day they return jointly to their houses, critically examining the new clothes, shoes and shawls before returning to the festival. Later, as they stroll through Campana’s small streets wearing their new attire, the visualization and ostentatious display of material abundance highlights the diff erences between those households that host friends and relatives during the festival days and those that lack any connection to the diaspora. Th ese diff erences exist throughout the year, but they become particularly obvious during the time of the festivities.

Negotiating Creole Asymmetries and Status Positions In Campanas the three main days of the banderona are the festive highlight of the year. Just as on the other islands – where patron saint festivities are by contrast much more commercialized and more strongly shaped by political party affi liation and connected to the international Cape Verdean music scene7 – a typically quiet village is transformed for a few days into a noisy party aff air. Th e quality of the party is measured by the infl ux of visitors, the head count of slaughtered animals, the number of pots fi lled with traditional Cape Verdean food, the quantities of donated alcohol, and the size and beauty of São João Baptista’s altar. Th e ritual chronology8 of the banderona is already centuries old. It begins with a Catholic mass for the feast’s patron saint on Friday evening. While the women pound corn for traditional corn meals such as xerem, catxupa and jagacida in huge mortars (pilões), the coladeiras9 (singers), accompanied by drummers Celebrating Asymmetries 143 and young men on wooden hobbyhorses, move processionally back and forth through the village streets, which are lined by hundreds of spectators and connect the upper and lower parts of the village. Th eir return signals the start of one of the festival high points – the ritual slaughter of several bullocks, goats, pigs and poultry amid the shouts of spectators and the songs of the coladeiras. Another key event of the day is the appearance of masked thieves who show up, snatch a huge portion of meat and disappear before being caught by the youth and carried back to the village. At the end of the feast the bandeira, the feast’s fl ag, is blessed by the local priest and run up the feast’s pole (Figure 7.1). Together the kordidjeru (head of the deciding committee) and the juiz (a performer playing the fi gure of the judge) make the fi nal decision on who will be allowed to take the fl ag and hence receive the honour of sponsoring the following year’s banderona. As onlookers applaud, the next festeiro grabs the fl ag and runs jubilantly through the village. Later the fl ag will be placed on the altar of São João Baptista, where requests by those in need will be made. An examination of the banderona’s historical background reveals continuities as well as transformations in the inherent creole social structure. Félix Monteiro, who studied the banderona of the island of Fogo during the 1940s, in his article ‘Bandeiras da Ilha do Fogo’, subtitled ‘o senhor e o escravo divertem-se’ (‘the master and the slave entertain themselves’), describes the origins of the ritual as

Figure 7.1. A bandeira, the feast’s fl ag, is run up the feast’s pole. (Photo by Heike Drotbohm, 2007) 144 Heike Drotbohm an encounter between the white aristocratic upper class and African slaves. After slavery had ended in colonial Cape Verde, the festeiro, as the master or sponsor of the feast, likewise fulfi lled his obligation to celebrate his wealth, generously distributing it by hosting a costly, lavish festival. As is common in patron/client relationships, the demonstration of wealth and power simultaneously served to reaffi rm the loyalty of his subordinates (Monteiro 1958: 10). Returning migrants, even during the early stages of Cape Verdean colonial history, integrated themselves and their interests into this ritual festivity. In her ethnography on the early, nineteenth-century phase of Cape Verdean transatlantic relations as they extended from the archipelago to North America, Marilyn Halter describes how Cape Verdean men worked in New England’s cranberry bogs and returned annually during the break in the growing season. Th roughout the weeks of their stay, their homecoming was celebrated in a prodigal manner. Baptisms and marriages were arranged, and the local patron saint was ritually thanked for their safe journeys (Halter 1993). Th ese historical shifts reveal that over time, diff erent actors have used the banderona to revive the foundation of a (post)colonial nation. As the result of a historical dynamic between mobility and sedentariness, the festivities are occasions for contemporary islanders and migrants to remind each other of their social positions, rights and duties. Certain roles are still celebrated in the festive moments in order to play out the historically grounded creole stratifi cation on stage: positions such as master, judge, horseman, singer and thief are revived in a performative manner. Th us the participants demonstrate that belonging to a certain social class, imagined in relation to variants of mobility, is the key marker of social diff erence. Th is needs to be seen as opposed to the mixing of cultures of origin, that is, a creole mode of imagining cultural encounters, or the ethnic identity that is the main marker in many other West African societies. Th is class-related aspect is celebrated vividly during the ritual peak of the festivity, when the local saint, São João Baptista, is worshipped. Many migrants from the island of Fogo retain an intense connection to São João Baptista, who is believed to spread health, strength and success among his adherents. In this moment of worship the festeiro and certain others hold small-denomination Ameri- can currency (one-, fi ve- and ten-dollar bills) high in the air and then, to the cheers of the crowd, deposit them bill by bill on the saint’s image (Figure 7.2). Th e sum collected in this manner is afterwards handed over to the local feast committee. Th e spiritual motivations that are apparent at this juncture of the festivities also must be addressed. Far more than the islanders, the migrants use the occasion of the banderona to address their personal saint. Many migrants, while in diaspora and particularly in times of crisis or disease, express a promesa (a solemn promise) to return to their home country and give thanks to their patron saint in the village of Campanas. Th ey understand tomar a bandeira (to take the fl ag) to be an act of faith and a public affi rmation of their affi liation to their ‘spiritual Celebrating Asymmetries 145

Figure 7.2. Coladreiras, drummers and the festeiro, donating small-denomination U.S. bills. (Photo by Heike Drotbohm, 2007) home’. In this context Zlatko Skrbiš asserts that home visits usually interweave secular and spiritual aspects, and that these visits’ emotional density makes them comparable to pilgrimages. Drawing from his observations of the Croatian diaspora, he illustrates how the interplay of national and ethnic-diasporic identities creates a feeling of nostalgia directly connected to a certain sacralized place (Skrbiš 2007). Spiritual and social motives are inextricably connected in this key moment of the ritual worship of São João Baptista. Th e migrants’ placing of dollar bills on the patron saint becomes a signifi cant manifestation of a symbolic exchange whereby money made by those migrants is rechanneled to the locality of origin. Hence, in this ritual the migrants enact their promise to the patron saint as well as their continued commitment to the local community. Additionally, this ostentatious display of the migrants’ powerful position serves to demonstrate and affi rm the status shift that they achieved in the course of their migration and now uphold through sustained affi liation to their former home country. In particular the sponsors of the banderona, who distinguish themselves from the other celebrants by wearing more formal attire, often a suit and tie, are those who provide the larger sums. Often they understand their migration-related successes in the context of a collective life-making and therefore feel a strong obligation to thank, recompense and symbolically redirect their revenues to their localities of origin. 146 Heike Drotbohm

Hence, migrants fulﬁ lling their promesa to the patron saint express spiritual and social loyalty with their monetary contribution. One migrant interviewee, a woman in her sixties who returns to Fogo annually, expressed it this way:

For some it’s mainly practical things, they want to thank those who helped to organize the journey, who oﬀ ered information or things, or housing maybe. For others it’s the mental support, not to travel on your own, leaving, but also arriving within a network of people who accom- pany you in their minds. When we refer to San Jon, this is what we are thankful for.

Several migrants directly attributed their social upward mobility and successful integration into more than one society to the assistance they received from those kin who stayed behind. While some emphasized practical aspects of support in the organization of the journey or the arrival phase, others highlighted the moral backing they experienced at the moment of departure from the islands, which they valued as crucial to their success in the diaspora. Th erefore, celebrating with foreign currency (for instance, the U.S. dollars mentioned above) is a way to underscore the relation between the project of migration and their individual gains as well as the formation of new social asymmetries. In these moments, migrants perform as the providers and those living on the islands as the receivers. Beyond this, the charity expressed in this kind of donation can also be seen in relation to the status claims often articulated by return migrants. Luin Goldring has described the typical need of migrants to display their upward mobility at the moment of return by exhibiting consumer goods. Many migrants eagerly antici- pate occasions during which they can transform the investments they have made over the course of migration into social recognition and prestige.

Th e community is not only a source, but a key context in which social and money capital can be deployed as status claims, and translated into status through appropriate valorization by a community who speaks the same language of stratiﬁ cation. (Goldring 1997: 184).

Th is can refer to diff erent types of migrants – not only the successful returnee who wishes to celebrate his gains, but also those who have experienced a loss of social and economic status. Especially in the case of visitors who have not achieved a fi nancially comfortable position in the diaspora but instead must work several jobs to fulfi l their duties in both the country of settlement and the country of origin, the ritual moment can be an opportunity for regaining recognition, an example of the ‘status paradox of migration’ (Nieswand 2011). Th ese returnees, many of whom cannot aff ord to return to Cape Verde annually, appreciate their participation at the banderona as a moment of compensation. Celebrating Asymmetries 147

Taking into account the diverse motives and modes of return, it is important to discuss social asymmetries as they are enacted during the days of the banderona, since these reveal an important ambivalence in these ludic encounters. Th e festeiro and other main sponsors accept their positions as patrons and are able to celebrate their duties, but not all visitors returning from the diaspora have the means to comfortably contribute so liberally. During their home visits, many migrants are confronted with the obligation to be generous and cover all eventual costs, even beyond the main days of the celebration. Th e idea that migrants are expected to demonstrate or confi rm their status position can result in direct requests by nonmigrants – be they family members, friends or others – who openly ask for or lay claim to gifts in the form of money, clothes or other kinds of support as if it were an assumed and expected exchange. Especially during the three main days of the banderona, migrants can hardly distance themselves from these requests, since the islanders use the festivities as an occasion to remind the migrants of their (actually or allegedly) privileged position. Although most migrants are aware of their particular position and duties and, hence, accept that they are expected to demonstrate generosity, many complain about the blatant manner in which their donor position is assigned. During the few weeks of their home visits, many of them go through their entire savings and leave the islands with empty suitcases, or as one person said, ‘half naked’. Otherwise, they have to endure being referred to as ‘cheap’ (the English term has been absorbed by Cape Verdean creole) or ingrót (unworthy). Th e above-discussed historical background is relevant to understanding these tensions and their social constellation because it has created a particular moral economy in which relations of dependency between local families and the support of poorer by wealthier ones are common. However, only in certain very poor local households does the material aspect of the festivities and support strategies predominate. In such cases the feast above all serves to tackle these asymmetries, test loyalties and claim solidarities. Th e moral evaluation of material diff erences, as it surfaces during the banderona, reminds returnees that the success of their migration is based in part on the functioning of their transnational social networks and on the support by those left behind. Th erefore many are confronted with obligations of generalized reciprocity, comparable with those linked to the ‘moral economies’ of peasant societies (Th ompson 1963), which they must fulfi l during their home visits yet remain unable to dissolve in any fi nal way.

Home as a Contested Resource Th e question of why Cape Verdeans living in the diaspora accept the above-ascribed roles has still not been answered completely. Are migrants for the most part satisfi ed that it has become expected of them to adequately support the kin they have left behind in the islands? Should moments of recognition and the 148 Heike Drotbohm social compensation of their eff orts be considered one of the main motives for a return visit? In addition to the reasons and interests already illuminated, I in- terpret the acceptance and the endurance of status ascriptions also as articulated claims for social integration and legitimized membership in these transnational social fi elds under circumstances of rapid economic transformation. One the one hand, return visits are only temporary stopovers and therefore also only temporary negotiations over the integration and participation of some in the lives of others. On the other hand, however, short visits can also be related to the idea of an eventual fi nal return, which many migrants take into consideration. For instance, a female migrant around sixty years old told me in a sponta- neous conversation:

See, some years ago, we came here for visiting family, for enjoying some nice days, celebrating a big party and our patron, San Jon. Today all this is diﬀ erent. Since our situation in the US became unclear, I try to come more often. Maybe I will live in Fogo, sooner or later, who knows how things will turn out over there [in the US].

I often heard similar comments connecting return visits with the idea of an eventual permanent return. Some migrants who spent their younger years in Cape Verde and left the islands as adults have enjoyed numerous achievements that stabilized and enriched their lives in the diaspora. But many migrants, particularly those who have not obtained U.S. citizenship, still consider conditions abroad to be uncertain and keep open the question of where they will spend their remaining years. Financial and real estate crises, along with the resultant soaring liabilities, have troubled migrant populations in particular. Pension adjustments also have dampened the outlook on living out one’s ‘sunset years’ in Boston, New York or Lisbon. In some cases, the time limits on green cards and other temporary residence permits make a ﬁ nal return after retirement probable. In addition, undocumented migrants are threatened by the ever present possibility of deportation (Drotbohm 2011). All of these motivations combine to fuel ideas of an eventual permanent return. For these reasons many migrants may feel obliged to keep in touch with and maintain their social presence in their community of origin. In this light, it becomes obvious that the social act of constituting or reviving ‘home’ is profoundly shaped by life conditions in other places and is particularly meaningful to those persons and groups who are in a vulnerable position. In a comparable context, Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser state:

Despite the unsettling of previously rooted and ﬁ xed notions of home, people engaged in transnational practices might express an uneasiness, a sense of fragmentation, tension and even pain. Everyday contestations of Celebrating Asymmetries 149

negotiating the gravity of one’s home is particularly distressing for those who are vulnerable, for example the poor, women, illegal immigrants and refugees. (Al-Ali and Koser 2002: 7)

Th erefore, many visitors seize the occasion of their visits and their particular position during the banderona not just to demonstrate their ﬁ nancial and social superiority, but also to conﬁ rm their solidarity and willingness to support the islanders. In this way they control their local visibility, marking their position within these village communities and articulating their claims of social belonging. Simultaneously they examine the conditions for an eventual permanent return. Th e island population also surveys these global transformations critically. Against this background they use the banderona to display their own particular power by highlighting the conditions of social integration and therefore also those of return. ‘Home’ in this context appears to be an increasingly contested resource that commemorates the contingencies of a successful life, which refers to more than one place of living but whose achievements remain ephemeral. Both the visitors who envision returning to stay and those who have remained behind and become receivers of transnational support make use of this resource: ‘home’. Th e latter demonstrate that communities of origin set up their own rules of social integration, which go along with high expectations and articulated conditionalities.

Conclusion Whether viewed as a privilege, emotional need or obligation, return visits constitute an important element in the confi guration and design of transatlantic Cape Verdean livelihoods. Especially the contingencies resulting from the most recent phase of globalization, as well as new inequalities that have evolved during this phase, have contributed to the social landscapes and national images in the countries of origin. As the above account illustrates, islanders and migrants alike use the banderona to foster their border-crossing networks and raise issues of transnational social asymmetries – not for the purpose of questioning such networks and asymmetries but rather to affi rm and conserve them. In this particular case, the historical overview that has been presented contextualizes the origins of the banderona in a postslavery and postcolonial society. Accordingly, the contemporary ritual reveals a historically grounded social stratifi cation that is both enacted and celebrated during the festivities. Notwithstanding the historical particularities of Cape Verde, similar shifts can be observed in other world regions: the former ethos of return, which many migrants cultivate in a nostalgic romanticization of their country of origin, has in recent times yielded to real and sometimes enforced ideas of an eventual permanent return. Against this background the festivities can be understood as a continuing desire to hold on to a ‘home’ and the regrounding as a particular kind of 150 Heike Drotbohm cohesion at this particular place. Th is desire and cohesion inform Cape Verdeans’ attempts to adapt to the changing social conditions that arise from the physical, social and at times emotional distance caused by emigration. Both the social constellations and the tensions that surface in the course of the banderona throw light on the challenges of the migrant/nonmigrant dynamic, which may increase in the future. In many countries shaped by a transnational livelihood, the most recent diversifi cation of return migration needs to be considered, as the social diff erentiation among the actors coexists alongside new hierarchies and dependencies. If the trend of increasingly strict border regimes and rising deportation rates continues even as migrants’ exclusion from citizenship rights becomes more common, the so-called ‘countries of origin’ will soon face new challenges. Future transnational studies therefore need to answer several questions resulting from these changes. What happens to families that have spread their livelihood and the allocation of tasks and duties across diff erent places and economies, and now, due to such changes, are obliged not only to rejoin their economic forces, but also to do so in the face of a diff erentiated fabric of values and societal roles? What macroeconomic consequences can be detected in the case of societies that obtain large portions of their GNP via their diasporic affi liations? In cases of the return of poor or forgotten migrants, how will their reintegration take place in societies that in fact rely on the fi nancial support of migrants? Lastly, what consequences do these kinds of conditionalities and transformations have for those in the diaspora who would like to return but cannot, due to their altered circumstances, comply with the expectations of their kin? Considering these changes it becomes apparent that a return ‘home’, once valued and praised in many places along the Atlantic Rim, may soon be judged in a more critical manner. In a dramatic change from previous decades, it is no longer predictable whether societies of origin will consider returnees a benefi t or an economic burden. Th erefore, the question of whether a migrant’s return can continue to be regarded as the kind of rebirthing proclaimed in the morna that opened this chapter, and furthermore whether such a return will be able to maintain its validity, desirability and congenial acceptance by those who have never left the islands, remains open for future consideration.

Heike Drotbohm currently is a guest professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freiburg University (Germany). She specializes in globalization and migration-related research issues, with a regional focus on Af- ro-Atlantic societies (West Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil). After earning her Ph.D. on Haitian spiritual belief in Canada, she worked in Cape Verde on the intersection between transnationalism, migration policies and family life. Subsequently she held interim professorships as well as fellowships in renowned international Celebrating Asymmetries 151 research centres. Her publications include the coedited special issue ‘Deporta- tion, Anxiety, Justice: New Ethnographic Perspectives’, Journal of Ethnic and Mi- gration Studies (41(4), 2014) and the coedited volume Anthropological Perspectives on Care. Work, Kinship, and the Life Course (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Notes 1. http://www1.umassd.edu/specialprograms/caboverde/etavares.html 2. Th e morna is a Cape Verdean song genre based on melancholic melodies and texts, drawing from the Portuguese fado and Brazilian modinha. In Cape Verde, the elder generation especially enjoys these laments, which always contain an element of sodadi (longing) and sakrifi s (sacrifi ce, suff ering), and have been taken up by younger generations in the form of more recent music genres. Eugenio Tavares (1867–1930), originally from the island of Brava, is considered the most important composer of the Cape Verdean morna (Lobban and Lopes 1995: 55). 3. Félix Monteiro (1958), who published an early article on these festivities on the island of Fogo, did not mention external actors having a particular position within the feast’s social structure. In the context of the tabanca, semireligious solidarity networks on the Cape Verdean island of Santiago, comparable patron saint festivities are important because they include the possibility of uniting persons involved in the network once a year (Semedo and Turano n.d.; Trajano Filho 2009: 528). 4. Each of the nine inhabited Cape Verdean islands has a tendency towards specifi c migration destinations that is the result of historical migration patterns. For instance, the two eastern islands of Sal and Boa Vista have huge diaspora populations in Italy, while Sao Vicente, one of the northern islands, has a sizable migrant population in England and the Netherlands (Carling 2001: 7). In the United States, larger Cape Verdean migrant communities can be found in the areas of Boston, Brockton and Long Island (Meintel 1984; Halter 1993). 5. For a summary of ‘strategic essentialism’ see Morton (2007: 126). 6. During such dinners, sympathizers and sponsors are invited to contribute to the project by means of either fi xed or voluntary amounts (usually USD 40–100). According to the main sponsor of the banderona in 2007, each of the sponsoring events raised a sum of approximately USD 2,000–3,000. 7. For the festa do primeiro de Maio in the town of Sao Filipe, or for the Cola San Jon on the neighbour island of Brava in mid June, thousands of migrants return each year via chartered fl ights and boats from diff erent places of the Cape Verdean diaspora. Unlike the banderona de Campanas de Baixo, these festivals charge visitors an entry fee and host beauty competitions, cockfi ghts, horse races and soccer matches. 8. Th e three main days of the banderona take place on the last weekend before Carnival. 9. Like the morna, the coladeira is a music or song genre associated with a certain rhythm and dancing style.

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Part III Travelling Models

Chapter 8 Travelling Terms Analysis of Semantic Fluctuations in the Atlantic World Wilson Trajano Filho

In this chapter I examine how systematic intersocietal encounters set cultural elements in motion across time and space, generating semantic instabilities that aff ect the meanings of things and ideas in a nonrandom way. My attention will be directed to the connections (and the turbulences they bring about) between the ecumenes that arose from processes of cultural creolization along the Upper Guinea Coast before the arrival of Europeans in the fi fteenth century; the Luso- African ecumene that developed in this portion of the African coast and the adjacent islands of Cape Verde; and the Caribbean ecumene, also the product of a long process of creolization involving Europeans of diff erent nationalities and Africans of various cultural and social provenance. I take each of these ecumenes as a vast fi eld of communication that provides actors with means to develop a sense of diff erence as well as a loosely disseminated feeling of sharing symbolic forms and social institutions. Th e word tabanka1 is used today by speakers of fi ve diff erent languages. It has been widely used in the varieties of Portuguese spoken in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, in the Portuguese-based Creoles spoken in these countries, in some Caribbean variations of English (Allsopp 2003) and in Trinidad’s English Creole (Winer 2009). One word, fi ve languages and at least three diff erent surface meanings form a synchronic picture that I want to scrutinize in its most simple form. Th e complete picture is far more complicated, involving other cognate words belonging to several languages spoken along the Upper Guinea Coast and diachronic processes of semantic fl uctuation triggered by a long history of intersocietal encounters. As the term is largely unknown to most Brazil- ian Portuguese speakers, I begin with our two major dictionaries. Th e word is absent in the Aurélio dictionary, but in Houaiss’s we fi nd the following glosses: (1) African village or locality, usually fortifi ed; (2) (Cape Verde) a kind of traditional fanfare on the Isle of Santiago (Houaiss 2001). Th e author adds that 158 Wilson Trajano Filho the fi rst entry in the Portuguese dictionaries appears in the 1881 Caldas Aulete dictionary. In what follows, I will analyse the semantic fl uctuations of the word tabanka over its fi ve-century journey of thousands of kilometres from the west coast of Africa to Trinidad, with a strategic stop at the Cape Verde Islands. Etymological inquiry is traditionally a linguistics issue, somewhat distant from the usual concerns of today’s anthropologists. Were we living at the time of the diff usionist debates in anthropology, with their main focus on the origins and dispersal of cultural artefacts, the present topic would hardly seem anachronistic and senseless. It is just as well that the diff usionist fad has to my relief been revisited of late under the guise of fl ows and counterfl ows of the globalized world system. Th is chapter presents my thus disguised ideas about the turbulences that have pro- voked semantic shifts in the word tabanka during its journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Th e challenge I face in this essay is to show how words have travelled in time and space from one society to another, and how their meanings have been changed during this journey to adjust to new conditions of use. Th is issue is to some extent similar to the one in Merry’s (2006) analysis of ideas of human rights: how they are appropriated by the vernaculars of various communities around the globe, have their core meanings changed and, thus transformed, are used to criticize everyday practices of violence. However, in comparison to the travelling terms treated by Merry, the appropriations and remakings I want to focus on diff er radically from those of the journey of human rights ideas in the contemporary world in terms of their temporal depth. Unlike the spread of human rights ideas, the semantic shifts I deal with do not emanate from a single hegemonic source but rather from myriad fl ows that can hardly be accurately retraced. Th ey are semantic changes that have been going on for centuries. Thus they bear a closer resemblance to certain changes in the moral ideas of the Sem- ites as treated by Mauss (1985: 170). In his classic study on the gift, Mauss argues that the original meaning of the Arabic and Hebraic terms sadaka and zedaqa was related to the idea of justice. However, through centuries, the meanings of these words were gradually changed, eventually consolidating around the ideas of charity and alms. Th is chapter will examine something similar. Like any etymological research, mine is riddled with guesses that can be very creative are but hardly ever open to the falsifi cation test. Th e path the term tabanka took in both time and in space cannot be fully retraced with the data now available. All I can do is revisit short stretches of its route and reach some conclusions as to the landscape it has covered, namely, the creolized social system that comprised the Atlantic World from the onset of European expansion in the mid-fi fteenth century, which I will depict as the intersection of several cultural ecumenes. Travelling Terms 159

Journey Inland: From Protection Against Violence to the Comforts of Home

In this section I focus on the semantic changes of terms that originate from the supposedly West Atlantic root *abank(?). Th ese terms originally conveyed the meaning of fortifi cation, which provided protection against violence brought about by confl icts between social groupings. For 300 years they went through semantic shifts, taking on new meanings referring to the inhabited space of the house, the kin group and the village. Although tracing the routes of this word’s diff usion through these fi ve languages is not my main focus, the fi rst question to be asked concerns its origins. Of uncertain etymology, it seems to have sprung from the dozens of languages of the so-called West Atlantic family that are spoken on the African coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone – including Wolof, Fula/Peul, Diola, Balanta, Banyun, Pepel, Manjaco, Mancanha, Baga and Temne – and have great syntactic and mor- phological similarities. In many of them, we fi nd a supposed root, *abank(?), that encompasses the semantic fi eld around ideas of locality, dwelling, protection, safety, defence, and (territorial) membership unit. Among the contemporary Baga-Sitem of the Republic of Guinea, the word abanka (pl. cibanka) refers to a village section or common yard of a residence cluster of three or four exogamous groups patrilineally descended (kor, ‘belly’) from a founding ancestor who came from elsewhere (a stranger). Th e Baga abanka refers to a corporate group and underlines a social identity that is often more important than kor or kinship. Each abanka has a protector spirit (amanko) that brings prosperity, protection and well-being to its members (Sarró 2009: 35–38).2 It seems, however, that the word abanka exists only in the Baga-Sitem language. Other Baga groups have other words to express other territorial logic. Ramon Sarró informed me (personal communication) that in the Bulongic language the term ebene covers more or less the same meaning as abanka, but they do not seem to stem from the same root. According to Walter Hawthorne (2003: 12), the Balanta people of Guin- ea-Bissau call the compact village they live in tabanka. It is the most important unit of Balanta social organization. People living in the same village share common interests, and the most important rituals and collective work associated with agricultural activities are performed and organized at this local level. Key institutions of Balanta social organization, such as age grades, the council of elders, and marriages, function at the tabanka level, working to strengthen community bonds. However, the Balanta recognize that tabanka means more than a unit of cohesive nature. It is also the unit within which the major cleavages of society take place, along lines of kin, generation, and gender (2003: 120). As a membership unit, the Balanta tabanka is the stage where processes of integration and 160 Wilson Trajano Filho confl ict occur − a stage that has a complex history. Hawthorne (2003: 121–23) explains that in precolonial times the Balanta lived in dispersed settlements in Guinea’s hinterland. Political upheaval caused by the Mande expansion since the thirteenth century and then by European expansion that intensifi ed the slave trade pushed them off to the mangrove seeking refuge. In this new environment they learned how to grow wet rice and founded compact villages, the tabankas, better suited for protection from slave traders.3 I have consulted other specialists in Balanta culture and society, and they all agreed that the word tabanka is strange to Balanta language. Although they concur with Hawthorne’s interpretation, they point out that his Balanta informants were using a Creole word to talk about some aspects of the group social organization. In other words, they mean that if the term tabanka has been used by Balanta speakers, it is a recent borrowing from the Creole language of Guinea-Bissau. Th e contemporary Mancanha in Guinea-Bissau use the same term to mean village, but it seems to be a loan word from the Creole language that emerged on Luso-African settlements, or from neighbouring peoples. According to linguist Jean-Louis Rougé (2004: 352; see also Buis 1990: 258), among the Manjaco the term N-tab (also untab) designates village. Th e resemblance to the Creole tabanka is crystalline, but it may be misleading to take them as cognate words. Th ey are more aptly a case of linguistic convergence (see below). In any case, one of the greatest ethnographers of this group informed me that the Manjaco word for village is ‘utchak; bolai is the term for hut, and kato is the word for house or dwelling (Eric Gable, personal communication). Further north of the Manjaco territory, the Diola of Guinea-Bissau and Casa- mance seem also to have words that stem from the root *abank(?). Th e southern Diola (Diola-Kassa) use the term hankahu to designate a lineage-based living area that comprises several houses. It is not a family house, which would be ellupai, but rather a lineage-based compound. Among the northern Diola (Diola-Fogny) the word would be funk, with the same meaning.4 Th e similarity of these Diola words indicates that both are derived from the West Atlantic root *abank(?). Moving north to Senegalese territory, we will fi nd that the Wolof tabakh now means ‘construction’, ‘wall’ or ‘building’ (usually with hard, durable materials like cement and bricks, as opposed to sampe, which is building with soft materials like wood or mud). I now move from the contemporary crystallizations around the root *abank(?) in the West Atlantic language stock to examine how it was described by the fi rst Portuguese and Luso-African travellers to the Guinea coast. Th e fi rst written reference is by André Álvares de Almada (1964: 367), a Cape Verdean trader who, in describing the African coast in 1594, used the verbal form atabancar to refer to Sierra Leonean Manes warriors’ custom of building fortifi cations within which they felt protected. He also used the noun form atabanca to designate the trenches the Manes dug (ibid.: 372). As a verb, the term seems to have been Travelling Terms 161 incorporated into the Portuguese variant then spoken in Cape Verde and on the Guinea coast, and likely into the budding Portuguese-based Creole in the region. Th irty years later another Cape Verdean, André Donelha (1977 [1625]: 102), used the term tabanka to refer to the fences and walls with very high watchtowers that surrounded the villages of Sierra Leonean coastal peoples.5 Another Cape Verdean trader, Francisco de Lemos Coelho, refers to the word tabanca in his seventeenth-century description of Cacheu, a Luso-African village in Guinea-Bissau. According to him, Cacheu was ‘surrounded by a stockade formed of pointed stakes with sharp tips, fastened together with crossbars, and it has two gates which are closed at night. Th e fence is called the tabanca of Casa Forte’ (Coelho 1990 [1684]: 149; see also Coelho 1990 [1669]: 34; 1990 [1684]: 151). In his comment on Donelha’s account, historian Paul Hair (1977: 250) reports that in the archaic forms of the Temne language, also in Sierra Leone, ka-baŋca meant fortifi cation or palisaded villages (see also Hair 1967: 46, 56). Coelho’s account of the use of the term tabanka in Cacheu leaves no doubt that this word entered the Creole language then spoken by the Luso-Africans as a loanword from Temne and other Mel languages spoken in Sierra Leone. Th e term was probably carried by coastal Sapi speakers (Temne, Bullom) who sought refuge and protection at Cacheu after the Mani invaded their territories in the mid-sixteenth century.6 Early evidence of a slight fl uctuation aff ecting the meaning of tabanka (or one of its West African cognates) came from a Scottish missionary named Henry Brunton in 1802. After a sojourn in the area that is presently Sierra Leone and Guinea, he published in Edinburgh a book containing a grammar and a vocabulary of Susu language. His vocabulary list there contains the word bankhi, which he glossed as dwelling house (1802: 63) without any allusion to fortifi cation or palisade. Th is evidence presents a problem for the case I am trying to make. Susu is a Mande language, so it belongs to a language family of the Niger Congo stock, quite diff erent from the West Atlantic languages supposed to be the origin of the root *abank(?) (see note 5). How to explain this? Bruce Mouser (personal communication) allows that bankhi is truly a Susu word, although he asserts that Brunton collected it in Baga territory. Th us it might be a case of borrowing from Baga language. According to Ramon Sarró (personal communication), words typically end with /i/ in Susu, especially when they are borrowings from other languages. Irrespective of its origin, my point in this connection is that the Susu bankhi represents a fi rst step towards a semantic shift from protection against violence and warlike activities (clearly associated with the slave trade) to the feeling of warmth characteristic of the domestic domain, and the practice of sociability associated with activities taking place in family and neighbourhood circles. Th e paucity of available data impedes a fully satisfactory explanation of why this se- 162 Wilson Trajano Filho mantic shift occurred, somehow unexpectedly, among the Susu living in Baga territory at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a period of visceral violence linked to the slave trade and the growing instabilities and rearrangements of political boundaries in the area. Although left largely unexplained, the fact is that some decades later, this semantic fl uctuation came to full completion along the same lines I have just examined in the Creole Luso-African settlements of Guinea-Bissau. Written sources suggest that in the Luso-African Creole spoken on the Guinea praças, up until the late nineteenth century, the term tabanka was used to mean a fortifi ed locality.7 A close look at the glossary (Portuguese-Creole) published by Barros (1902) suggests that the term tabanka was still undergoing a semantic shift at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Creole society of Guinea-Bissau. He translated Portuguese paliçada (palisade) as tabanca (1902: 188); Portuguese aldeia (village) was aldya (ibid.: 85); and Portuguese murado (to be walled) was glossed as q’o ten tabanca (ibid.: 186) Th ese examples suggest that the meaning of tabanka in the Creole language was in conformity with the old usage. However, Barros also translated Portuguese povoação (settlement) as tabanca (ibid.: 270), a gloss that suggests the semantic fi eld of the Creole word was undergoing a process of lexical expansion similar to that of the word bankhi in the Susu language. From then on, it lost the semantic component of fortifi cation, defence and protection to mean simply village or settlement. It was certainly a gradual process. I fi rst came across this word meaning settlement or village in offi cial Portuguese documents from 1850 and on. It referred to the quarters of the auxiliaries of Luso-African traders – newcomers to Creole settlements – located just outside Bissau. It was called tabanka dos grumetes (sailors’ village or quarter). Curiously, they were set apart from the Luso-African town, locally known as praça, by a wall built by the colonial governor that stood until 1913. Th e wall was not designed to protect the African village, but rather to assure that the Bissau Creole population had some security and control over the frequent abuses by auxiliaries of dubious loyalty. Only then – from 1850 on – did the term meaning settlement or village set in the Guinea Creole. Th is semantic change is an example of lexical expansion that is quite common in Creole languages, as may be gauged by the central place the relexifi cation hypothesis has in creole studies. Hancock (1980) identifi es twelve categories of lexical progression in general. Th e case of tabanka is dubious: it might be explained as semantic extension – ‘a new interpretation for an item, in addition to, or in replacement of, its original use’ (Hancock 1980: 74); semantic shift – ‘the same as semantic extension, except that the original meaning has not survived’ (ibid.: 78); convergence –‘two forms originally distinct acquire the same pho- nological surface form’ (ibid.: 79); or adoption – ‘the acquisition of items from other languages’ (ibid.: 81).8 I cannot advance much on this regard, but refer to Jean-Louis Rougé’s (2004: 352) argument for convergence, according to which Travelling Terms 163 the current meaning of tabanka in Guinean Creole as ‘village’ comes from convergence with Manjaco N-tab or untab. I should mention, however, that the word’s use has an evident sociological connotation. In Guinea Creole, tabanka is not used to designate just any village, but only the villages of local indigenous peoples. Urban clusters inhabited by Portuguese and creolized Luso-Africans are called praças, regardless of size and location. Th is dichotomy is a clear manifestation of an opposition that is constitutive of the Creole world, namely, the cultural cleavage between the space of ‘Creoleness’ – the praças – and that of ‘Africanness’ – the tabancas, from where Creole society has historically recruited most of its members.

Journey to the Islands: From Territory to Conviviality In this section I focus on the second stop of the long journey of the semantic fl uctuations of tabanka. Th is stop altered the route already taken, which had led to the idea of village, refl ecting a move towards the idea of conviviality. In the word’s journey to the Creole of Santiago, I notice a semantic change that appears to be radical but in fact is deeply connected to the underlying meanings it has on the Guinea coast.9 According to the Cape Verdean writer Félix Monteiro (1948: 14), in the remote past the word was also used in Santiago to mean settlement or village, but its original reference to a territorial unit was lost, and nowadays most Creole speakers in Cape Verde do not recognize it.10 Interestingly, what Monteiro calls an old usage (tabanka as village) is in fact quite recent. Presently, Santiago people, especially the adults, take tabanka to mean a mutual aid association that is very important to the peasants in the interior and to the residents of poor neighbourhoods in the town of Praia. For the young people and those who come from the windward islands, however, this reference to mutual aid has been blurred: now the word is mostly used to designate a kind of popular feast unique to the islands of Santiago and Maio and, more recently, a mass-culture musical style derived from the music played during tabanka festivities. Th us, to speak of tabanka in Cape Verde is to speak of feasting and joy, of striking sounds and colours. Nevertheless, something of the original sense of village or settlement still remains, for if tabanka is festivity, it is always the festivity of a village, a neighbourhood or even a cluster of scattered houses. Th is is why one speaks of Tabanka of Várzea, of Achada Santo António, of Achada Grande (Praia neighbourhoods), of Chã de Tanque, Lém Cabral, and other places on the island. Hence, whether as an institution or as a feast, the word in Santiago Creole retains a metonymic relationship vis-à-vis the Guinean meaning of settlement, in the sense that the part suggests the whole. Large-scale festivities cannot occur without social actors to organize complex activities and take on responsibility for the effi cacy of the performance. In other words, if tabanka means festivity, it also means a type of institution that leads or 164 Wilson Trajano Filho organizes the feast. Although less visible to the Cape Verdeans of the windward islands and the country’s larger urban centres, this institutional component continues to be the tabanka’s raison d’être. Put in this way, the Cape Verde tabanka is an institution with a complex structure that recruits members from a territorial base and works as a brotherhood, or a mutual aid association. As an institutional association, the structure of the tabanka copies that of society to create a miniature social system. Just like a society, tabankas have chiefs, law and order agents, crooks, prestigious personages, and values and symbols of their own. Th ey also have kings and queens, ministers, physicians, policemen and thieves, soldiers with guns and uniforms, distinguished people as counsellors and ambassadors, and regular, subordinate people who are called catibos (captives) and negas (black women). In a critical and ironic mode, their subordinate group mimics the slave society of the past and the inequalities of the present. In the vast majority of tabanka pageants, this group is classifi ed by the same categories that once referred to slaves. It is mostly made up of women. Tabanka insignias are rated as values. Among them, the banner representing the patron saint has the highest value. It is starkly simple, a metaphoric rendition of the believers’ poverty and purity. Besides the patron saint’s banner, there are others of a diff erent nature. Extremely colourful, they display very diff erent de- signs, revealing the workings of a syncretic mindset that voraciously assimilates everything that comes its way. Th ey lend life and colour to the brotherhood members’ long excursions towards the houses of the feast promoters, called reis (rainhas) de agasalho (shelter kings or queens), who always live in the neighbouring villages. Th ese insignias of life and colour refl ect the Cape Verdeans’ particular way of reproducing their own society, which is based on emigration strategies. Only in a society of emigrants can we fi nd, as commonplace objects, banners of Turkish soccer teams, stylized national fl ags from various countries, and the typical admixture of mass culture in a globalized world, juxtaposing American and Jamaican colours and symbols, a black hero like Bob Marley and an icon of mass culture like Michael Jackson. Alongside fl ags and banners, musical instruments are also powerful symbols of the tabankas: two or three crude drums, a collection of three to six seashells (conches), and a military trumpet in some brotherhoods. Th e production and distribution of these goods do not satisfy local demand, and their consequent rarity lends prestige to the owner associations. Also worth considering are the values that are transmitted by these feasts. I limit myself to those values that, with critical irony, attempt to reproduce an idea of order typical of the colonial society that serves as the tabanka’s model. Th ree elements are vigorously present at the brotherhood rituals, especially during long pageants for collecting gifts from the shelter kings. First, the value of order and discipline is materialized in the act of queuing up and in the general concern for a highly organized and orderly march. Th e pageant is more than a mere outing: it is framed as a Creolized rendition of military marches and pilgrimages (Trajano Travelling Terms 165

Filho 2011). Th e catibos and negas must remain strictly in single fi le; there is even a character responsible for whipping them whenever they step out of it. A second feature representing order and social control, satirically lived out at the tabanka feast, is the organization of time. Treated in utter caricature, respect for schedule is often acted out in ritual games during the feast. A tabanka member who arrives late to any of his activities is punished severely. Taken to a corner that functions as a jail, he is tied up, a crown of thorns on his head, to endure the jeers of passers-by. Th us, with nesfi and arrests, outlandish rigour in the control of time, and a military-like obsession with queues, the tabankas ritually live through the order, discipline and hierarchy of the dominant society in both the present and in the past while also bringing vigour, rhythm and colour to the ritual. Each tabanka has its own patron saint chosen from popular Catholicism with celebrations in June (Saint Anthony, Saint John and Saint Peter). Th eir image and that of the holy family are kept and venerated in chapels and courts erected in their honour. Th ese are also places for prayer and pleas for abundance, plenty of rain at the right time, good harvests in the coming months and harmony for the district and its residents. Under the protection of the patron saints, these chapels house, for their delight, the off erings of the tabanka’s members and its shelter kings and queens. Th e gifts are auctioned at the end of the common meals that begin on the saint’s day, which today last for four or fi ve days. Despite surface diff erences in the meaning of the word tabanka in Cape Verde and in Guinea, I wish to emphasize some connections between them. In the fi rst place, whether an institution or a festivity, in Santiago Creole the word maintains a metonymic relationship with the idea of a living place, as a part that suggests the whole. Moreover, like cibanka among the Baga-Sitem and many other peoples of the Guinea coast, a Cape Verde tabanka has a patron saint as its protector spirit, a source of well-being, prosperity, fertility and abundance. Th e allegories, uniforms and musical instruments of the Cape Verde associations are called armamento, which I gloss as ‘weaponry’. Military and religious meaning pervades both role ascription in the processions towards the home of the shelter king and the form these pageants take. Commanders, soldiers, policemen and captives parade in a parody of order and discipline. After all, to leave one’s place of residence and march through valleys and riverbanks to other places is, cosmo- logically speaking, to brave the dangers of a no-man’s land. Underlying all this are ingrained ideas of protection and defence against both mystical and human enemies in the deepest sense of the African palisaded tabankas. Lastly, the existence of these associations in Santiago and the perception the local Creole elites have of them also hint at a constitutive opposition in the Creole world analogous to that in Guinea-Bissau. Here, instead of a cultural cleavage between the spaces of Creoleness and Africanness, the social division is between, on the one hand, the peasants in the interior and the poor in the Praia urban periphery, and on the other, the educated elite of the plateau. 166 Wilson Trajano Filho

Across the Ocean: Towards Aﬀ ection

My analysis of the semantic changes of the word tabanka could end here, and the reader could go directly to my concluding remarks. However, I choose to take a more audacious stance and face the semantic turbulences that might have aff ected the core meaning of this word in its likely journey to the New World. Th e modal used to express probability or condition and the journey’s depiction as but a possibility indicate that we are navigating an ocean of speculations that are hardly falsifi able. Th ere is both ônus and bônus in such an endeavour. Th e price we risk paying is widely known: we might be facing a case of false cognate. I fi rmly believe, however, that we cannot be charged much for it, because one ‘can never tell where a word comes from’ when dealing with language contact in a diff use setting (Le Page 1998: 66).11 On the other hand, two bonuses might await us at the fi nishing line. Th e fi rst would be the refutation of the allegation of false cognate, which would mean gaining an extra layer of knowledge about the historical fl ows from the African coast to the Caribbean Islands. Th e second is somewhat independent of the ônus and has to do with the general hypothesis of this work, namely, that intersocietal encounters (in our case, between creolized ecumenes) stir up semantic turbulences in classifi catory categories, values and symbols. In the case of encounters between creolized ecumenes, semantic changes aff ecting a particular cultural category tend to preserve part of the previous meaning it had in its original setting. Th e word tabanka’s journey from the Guinea coast to the Cape Verde islands and the surface semantic shifts that occurred during its travels are related to the unremitting intercommunication between ecumenes (i.e. that of the Up- per Guinea Coast, and the Luso-African ones) in the context of the creolization process that gave birth to a Creole society in Cape Verde. Th ese long-term intersocietal encounters would likely have caused some kind of social and cultural turbulence powerful enough to shake the cultural kit of conceptual tools for thinking and conceiving sociability, conviviality, security and protection while still maintaining some degree of continuity with the deep semantic core of the root *abank(?). I now turn, very briefl y, to a supposedly third moment of the tabanka trip, stopping strategically on the island of Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela. Here the word means neither a village (fortifi ed or not) nor a mutual aid institution that manages reciprocity within and across villages. Revealing yet another semantic transformation, the Trinidadian tabanka refers to a specifi c kind of suff ering and oppression, somewhat similar to a state biomedicine classifi es as a psycho- pathology. According to anthropologist Roland Littlewood (1998: 121), it refers to ‘the inappropriate psychological response to desertion’. Th is is a working-class cultural category, unlike the idea of adultery, which is restricted to middle-class settings. It happens when a man’s wife abandons him, particularly for another Travelling Terms 167 man, and the abandoned husband succumbs to loss and misery rather than re- sume life as usual. Disheartened, he begins to show signs of lethargy and anorexia and to lose interest in work. He wanders aimlessly through the streets or retires to the solitude of his house to nurture his hatred for the unfaithful woman. He drinks and smokes excessively, eats little or nothing, does not sleep and, in extreme cases, dies of neglect or accident, or commits suicide (Littlewood 1993: 47–52; 1998: 85–86, 117–19). Th is kind of disorder, verging on madness, is not caused by the fact of being abandoned, but by the victim’s response to abandonment. Moreover, it should not be taken for lovesickness. It only occurs when the man and woman have had a sexual and economic relationship, especially when they were wedded in the Church. In Trinidad, the tabanka is basically a form of emotional expression that affl icts men much more frequently than it does women, and appears among the Creole and rural populations as well as the tibourgs (petty bourgeoisie) and béke negres (black whites) who aspire to the white middle-class lifestyle (Littlewood 1998: 117).12 Contrary to what one might expect, those unaff ected by it take it as an opportunity to heap scorn and irony upon the disgruntled husband. Th ey scoff at his economic and psychological investment in another person in a world riddled with precariousness and individualism. As Littlewood (1998: 121–22) clearly perceived in regard to the humour of tabanka, this is not a criticism of the faithfulness and respectability inherent in Christian marriage, but rather of the somewhat snobbish aspirations of persons from the lower strata of society who emulate a lifestyle based on white or local middle-class values. Th e tabanka victim loses his reputation, an important value in the lower ranks of Creole society. He also loses the little respectability he so unsteadily won when he mimicked the bourgeois ethos by getting married, respectability being a central value for the middle strata of society.13 With such diff erent renderings in Trinidad, Cape Verde and Guinea, it would be unsurprising if the relationship between these words in Creole languages so far apart were mere homonymy with no common underlying meaning. My research is still very inconclusive, if not negative. I consulted several specialists on Caribbean Creole languages but got no defi nite answer. Lise Winer told me that the term seems to have been introduced recently; the earliest written record she found dated from 1957. She also referred to vague and highly speculative inter- pretations that the Trinidadian tabanka might come from tabaka in Kikongo, a language spoken in the Congo and Angola. Tabaka can be glossed as ‘sell out or buy up completely’ (Winer 2009: 871). In Trinidad (also in Guyana and Gre- nada, according to Allsopp 2003) it would have acquired the meaning of loss of love. Other authors believe that in the Caribbean, the word comes from a term in Kituba, a ‘contact-based’ (Creole?) language variety spoken in Central Africa. It is worth noting that a variety of this Creole language, called Kikongo ya leta or Kikongo-matadi, emerged in late nineteenth century as a lingua franca and later 168 Wilson Trajano Filho became the vernacular language of people living at administrative outposts in west, south and east Kinshasa. Th e expression Kikongo-matadi refers to a railroad that connects Matadi (a port town) to Kinshasa. It was built by workers brought in from Senegal and Sierra Leone (Mufwene 2009: 213) who spoke various languages of the West Atlantic stock, source of the root *abank(?). Littlewood (1993: 266) also attempted to pinpoint the etymology of the Trinidadian tabanka but concluded that it is obscure and likely to be multiple. He suggests that it comes from a cognate of the French-based Creole ta banque, meaning bankruptcy or breach of contract, of the Creole ti blanc (little white) or even of the Jamaican bacha (little banana, in this case, lack of erection). Another possible origin would be tabanco, a Spanish Central American word referring to ‘a place for castrated cocks’. Allsopp (2003) suggests it might have come from the cognate (or borrowed word) tabangke in Makushi (a Carib language), which means ‘wonder.’ In any case, many Africans who arrived in Trinidad as slaves came from the Upper Guinean coast, a region where a number of local languages share the root *abank(?), giving credence to the hunch that the term is of Guinean origin. Even if future linguistic research reveals that this is not the case, it seems that the similarity between the Guinean, Cape Verdean and Trinidadian forms is not merely an accidental homonymy, because this part of the Caribbean has been an area of intersection between various cultural ecumenes that arose during creolization processes triggered by European expansion since the late fi fteenth century. To Trinidad converged people, language forms and items as well as a repertoire of values and ideas from continental America, other Caribbean Islands, the East Indies, Europe and Africa (including the Upper Guinea Coast). Th is convergence may have produced a kind of semantic turbulence that altered the original meaning of the word that the Trinidadian tabanka derives so as to impregnate it with some connotations (or transformations of them) of the Cape Verdean and Guinean tabanka. Furthermore, the gap in meaning is not too wide; a semantic continuity in the use of the word is visible in the three Creole languages. First, there is a connotation of an intense but ambiguous feeling of security, protection and sociability. Th e Trinidadian case involves a clear structural inversion, where the positive signal associated with this feeling becomes negative. A second resemblance lies in the mode of parody, caricature and criticism in the tabanka of Cape Verde and Trini- dad. Finally, in all three countries, the term indicates a basic opposition between social groups or cultural forms: in Guinea, between spaces of Creoleness and Africanness; in Cape Verde, between peasant social forms and the lowest strata of society on one hand, and the educated elite on the other; and in Trinidad, between the structural principles of reputation and respectability, quite similar to the Cape Verdean case. Figure 8.1 synthesizes the various steps taken by this word in its journey from the coast of African to the Caribbean. Travelling Terms 169

Figure 8.1. Synoptic Chart of Semantic Shifts

Concluding Remarks Th ough I still have a long way to go, I will conclude by saying that a close look at the semantic fl uctuations of the term tabanka suggests a scenario of historical connections between various cultural ecumenes that, in turn, derive from cultural and linguistic creolization, and all overlap on the Caribbean Islands. I take up the idea of the ecumene from a long anthropological tradition that includes the work of Kroeber (1946), Kopytoff (1987), Hannerz (1991) and Mintz (1996). Inspired by these authors, I take ecumene to mean a fi eld of intense communication through both time and space, where social agents share, alongside a number of isolated traits – idiom, institutions, culinary habits, naming practices and symbolic forms – a deep sense of common history, maintained and reproduced regardless of spatial contiguity (see Mintz 1996: 297). Kroeber’s ecumene is a ‘great historic unit … a frame within which a particular combination of processes happened to achieve certain unique results’ (1946: 9). As I see it, though, what makes it unique is not the particular combination of processes or shared cultural traits, but the way its internal diff erences are acted out. It is bound together by a kind of relationship between alterities that is not based on the logic of distinctive oppositions between sociocentric categories of group identity (Pina Cabral 2010: 7–8), but upon the exercise of a ‘working acceptance’, in Goff man’s expression. Th is working acceptance, says Goff man (1967: 11), is the fundamental feature of any interaction, as it enables participants in social encounters to deploy self-regulation. Working acceptance is a ritual act. It is in the minutest of interaction rites that we learn how to be percep- tive; to have feelings related to the self, a self connected to a positive self-image 170 Wilson Trajano Filho

(the face); to be proud and dignifi ed when dealing with other people; to display consideration, sensitiveness, tact and demeanour. In short, these tiny rituals require a certain indulgence, a sort of ‘temporary truce’ that lets the interaction go on even amongst constant off enses. In contexts of intersubjectivity, the ecumene becomes visible in everyday life when it assures social agents (not necessarily in terms of a refl exive awareness) that they have a shared history, especially regarding how diff erence is perceived and how persons are made. Th us objectifi ed by social agents, the ecumene whets our appetite for thinking far beyond the diff usion of cultural traits, acculturation or syncretism. As Pina Cabral (2010: 16) states, it makes us identify echoes that allow denizens of the same ecumene to recognize each other. Th ese echoes render their world more intelligible. Th inking of tabanka’s long journey from the west coast of Africa to the Car- ibbean islands as part of a process that linked various ecumenes frees us of the empiricist temptation to try to understand that world in terms of the diff usion of individual cultural traits. It also saves us from falling into lazy generic notions such as ‘the world in fl ux’, ‘Black Atlantic’ and others. It forces us to ask two questions I deem quite important. First, what happens when cultural ecumenes come to an intersection? Th is makes us ponder what sort of turbulence is behind the semantic fl uctuations I have just examined, and how strongly they disturb the conceptual kit of cultural categories that frame the experience of the social actors (ideas of protection, security, sociability and reciprocity, as well as the lack of them). Th e second question addresses the concrete object of my analysis. Al- though I have focused on the semantic fl uctuations of a single lexical item, I hope I have shown that they are associated with continuities and discontinuities in ways of conceiving sociability and diff erence. True, I could have done this by following the journey of any other cultural object towards the intercommunication between ecumenes. But would I have been able to do so with any object? How do we choose the items we carry in our luggage on these trips that, after all, are no more or less than the expansion and contraction of ecumenes?

Acknowledgements Th is text has beneﬁ ted from the sound ethnographic knowledge of many colleagues who provided me valuable information on the word tabanka or its cognates in their areas of research. I want to express my gratitude to Ramon Sarró, Eric Gable, Joanna Davidson, Peter Mark, Bruce Mouser, Heike Drotbohm and Lise Winner for their prompt and generous answers to my questions. It goes without saying that I am solely responsible for its shortcomings.

Wilson Trajano Filho is an associate professor at the Department of Anthropol- ogy, University of Brasilia, Brazil, where he researches and teaches anthropology Travelling Terms 171 of Africa, African popular culture, Creolization and creole societies along the Upper Guinea Coast and anthropological theory. He was visiting professor at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), University of Lisbon and at the University of Cape Verde. He is an associate of the Upper Guinea Coast research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He edited Lugares, Pessoas e Grupos (ABA Publicaçoes, 2010) and Travessias Antropológicas (ABA Publicações, 2012). With Gustavo Ribeiro he coedited O campo da Antropologia (ContraCapa, 2004), and with Jacqueline Knörr, Th e Powerful Presence of the Past (Brill, 2010).

Notes 1. Th e spelling of this word varies a lot. In the Portuguese dictionaries, it is spelt tabanca, but Creole dictionaries spell it tabanka. In this essay I will adopt the latter form because it suggests a non-Portuguese origin. 2. According to Hair (1967: 46), the Baga word is ke-baŋka, meaning ‘village’. 3. See Horton (1976) for a dynamic model that relates state and stateless societies in West Africa. Th e pattern of settlement (dispersed and compact villages) plays a key role in this model. 4. I should thank respectively Joanna Davidson and Peter Mark for this information. 5. He also uses this word to refer to the stockade made of posts and pieces of trees that encircled the Mandingo village of Cação, on the River Gambia (1977: 150). Commenting on this passage, Teixeira da Mota (1977: 300–302) notes that other descriptions testify to the existence of palisades in Mandingo villages. However, this does not mean that the word has a Mande origin. 6. It is interesting to note that the Temne word did not enter the English-based Creole spoken by the Krio in the Freetown peninsula, much closer to Temne traditional territory than to Cacheu. 7. See Oliveira (1888–1889: 307): ‘Th e most important settlements are protected by strong tabancas … around the houses and huts of these villages is constructed a type of wall, with tall and thick trunks of trees’. 8. See also Baptista (2007) for an analysis of congruence between substractal languages and Portuguese in creole formation. 9. I leave unexplored a possible derivation of the Santiagoan Creole funco (poor housing, hut) from the West Atlantic root *abank(?). Th is word appears in several historical sources meaning house (Álvares 1990), granary (Álvares 1990 [1615]; Kup 1961: 102) chapel or shrine (Álvares 1990) and porch or balcony (Almada 1964: 348). Th ese authors use it in their descriptions of events taking place in the Isle of Bissau and in various parts of Sierra Leone. According to Hair (1977: 266), similar words exist in modern Temne: αη-fuηk (granary) and αη-puηkaη (balcony, porch). Th e similarity to the Diola funk is remarkable (see above). 10. See also Carreira (1964) and Rougé (2004) for the meanings of this word in the Luso- African cultural universe. 11. Th e opposition between focused and diﬀ use linguistic ideologies and practices has been discussed by Le Page & Tabouret-Keller (1985) and Le Page (1998). 12. Nowadays, the meaning of tabanka has been extended to designate bereavement and other losses (Littlewood (1998: 117). It has been employed, e.g., to refer to the feeling of loss related to political competition or disputes, especially after elections, which is called 172 Wilson Trajano Filho

‘political tabanka’ (cf. Winer 2009: 871). Heike Drotbohm (personal communication) informed me that in Trinidadian urban contexts, the word has been used in colloquial reg- ister to express a feeling of longing or missing something precious. In addition, it seems that the word is going through a semantic extension in certain social circles, whereby it begins to play a new role in everyday discourses. Th e exact direction of this change is not yet clear, but the Trinidadian tabanka seems to be a good candidate to stand for the ethos of the country’s culture. 13. Littlewood borrows from Wilson (1995) the opposition between reputation and respectability as the two primary principles of Caribbean social structures.

References Allsopp, R. 2003. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Kingston: University of West Indies Press. Almada, A.Á. de 1964 [1594]. ‘Tratado breve dos rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde’, in A. Brasio (org.), Monumenta Missionária Africana, África Ocidental (1570-1600), vol. 3. Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, pp. 229–378. Álvares, M. 1990 [1615]. Etiópia Menor e a descripção geográfi ca da província da Serra Leoa, translated and edited by P.E.H. Hair. Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool. Baptista, M. 2007. ‘Selection and Competition in Creole Formation: A Case Study’, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 13(2): 39–50. Barros, M.M. 1902. ‘O Guineense’, Revista Lusitana 7: 81–96, 166–88, 268–82. Brunton, H. 1802. Grammar and Vocabulary of Susoo Language. Edinburgh: J. Ritchie, Black- friars Wynd. Buis, P. 1990. Essai sur la langue Manjako de la zone de Bassarel. Bissau: INEP. Carreira, A. 1964. ‘Aspectos da infl uência da cultura portuguesa na area compreendida entre o rio Senegal e o norte da Serra Leoa’. Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa 76: 373–416. Coelho, F.L. 1990 [1669, 1684]. Duas descrições seiscentistas da Guiné, edited by Damião Peres. Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa de História. Donelha, A. 1977 [1625]. Descrição da Serra Leoa e dos rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde (Description of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde), edited and translated by A. Teixeira da Mota and P.E.H. Hair. Lisbon: Junta de Investigações Científi cas do Ultramar. Goff man, E. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books. Hair, P.E.H. 1967. ‘An Ethnolinguistic Inventory of the Upper Guinea Coast before 1700’, African Language Review 6: 32–70. ———. 1977. ‘Notas aos capítulos 1 a 6’, in A. Donelha, Descrição da Serra Leoa e dos rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde/Description of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde, edited and translated by A. Teixeira da Mota and P.E.H. Hair. Lisbon: Junta de Investigações Científi cas do Ultramar. Hancock, I.F. 1980. ‘Lexical Expansion in Creole Languages’, in A. Valdman and A. Highfi eld (eds), Th eoretical Orientations in Creole Studies. New York: Academic Press, pp. 63–88. Hannerz, U. 1991. ‘Th e Global Ecumene as a Network of Networks’, in A. Kuper (ed.),Con- ceptualizing Societies. London: Routledge, pp. 34–56. Hawthorne, W. 2003. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea- Bissau Coast, 1400–1900. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Travelling Terms 173

Horton, R. 1976. ‘Stateless Societies in the History of West Africa’, in J.F.A. Ajayi and M. Crowder (eds), History of West Africa, vol. 1. London: Longman, pp. 72–113. Houaiss, A. 2001. Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva. Kopytoff , I. 1987. ‘Th e Internal African Frontier: Th e Making of African Political Culture’, in I. Kopytoff (ed.), Th e African Frontier: Th e Reproduction of African Societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 3–87. Kroeber, A.L. 1946. ‘Th e Ancient Oikoumenê as a Historic Culture Aggregate’ (Huxley Me- morial Lecture for 1945), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 75: 9–20. Kup, P. 1961. A History of Sierra Leone, 1400–1787. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Page, R.B. 1998. ‘“You Can Never Tell Where a Word Comes From”: Language Contact in a Diff use Setting’, in P. Trudgill and J. Cheshire (eds), Th e Sociolinguistics Reader: Multi- lingualism and Variation, vol. 1. London: Arnold, pp. 66–89. Le Page, R.B., and A. Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Lan- guage and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Littlewood, R. 1993. Pathology and Identity: Th e Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Th e Butterfl y and the Serpent: Essays in Psychiatry, Race and Religion. London: Free Association Books. Mauss, M. 1985. ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaiques’, in M. Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: PUF, pp. 145–279. Merry, S.E. 2006. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mintz, S.W. 1996. ‘Enduring Substances, Trying Th eories: Th e Caribbean Region as Oikou- menê’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 289–93. Monteiro, F. 1948. ‘Tabanca: evolução semântica’, Claridade 6: 14–18. Mufwene, S.S. 2009. ‘Kituba, Kilela, or Kikongo? What’s in a Name?’ in C. de Féral (ed.), Le nom des langues III: nom des langues en Afrique sub-saharienne: pratiques, dénominations, catégorisations. Louvain: Peeters, pp. 211–22. Oliveira, E.J.C. 1888–1889. ‘Guiné portuguesa: esboço cartográfi co’, Boletim da Sociedade de Geografi a de Lisboa 8: 297–308. Pina Cabral, J. 2010. ‘Lusotopia como ecumene’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 74: 5–20. Rougé. J.-L. 2004. Dictionnaire étymologique des créoles portugais d’Afrique. Paris: Karthala. Sarró, R. 2009. Th e Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Teixeira da Mota, A. 1977. ‘Notas aos capítulos 7 a 14’, in A. Donelha, Descrição da Serra Leoa e dos rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde (Description of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde), edited and translated by A. Teixeira da Mota and P.E.H. Hair. Lisbon: Junta de Investigações Científi cas do Ultramar. Trajano Filho, W. 2011. ‘Goff man en Afrique: les cortèges de tabancas et les cadres de l’expé- rience’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 201: 193–236. Wilson, O.J. 1995. Crab Antics: A Caribbean Case Study of the Confl ict between Reputation and Respectability. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Winer, L. 2009. Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press. Chapter 9 Rice and Revolution Agrarian Life and Global Food Policy on the Upper Guinea Coast Joanna Davidson

Introduction Along the Upper Guinea Coast, rice has played a signifi cant role in shaping land and livelihoods, persons and population fl ows, desires, dreams, disappointments, spiritual and moral life, and interactions and transactions for many hundreds of years, or perhaps even a few thousand. For several centuries this area of West Africa was known to Europeans as the Grain or Rice Coast, signalling their recognition of the importance, abundance and defi ning aspect of rice in this region (or, more selfi shly, their own interest in securing this rice in their trade along the coast). But both before and after European dominance in this area, rice played a defi ning role in residents’ interactions with each other and with the various outsiders who traded, raided and invaded in their midst. Rice in this region has been linked to the rise of the great precolonial West African states of Ghana, Mali and Songhai (Grist 1959; Osseo-Asare 2005). Th e rice-growing landscape – especially the mangrove swamps – that evokes the topographical imaginary of this region has often served as a refuge from various external forces and foes, from centuries-old Islamic incursions (Paulme 1963; Linares 1981) to more recent iconoclasts (Sarró 2009), and from Atlantic slavers (Hawthorne 2003) to more recent civil strife (Richards 2006). Th is chapter provides a broad view of the history and interpenetration of rice in social, political, religious and ecological domains across the Upper Guinea Coast, chronicling also the current diffi culties of residents in this region who are no longer able to grow enough of it. I have divided the chapter into two parts. Part One, in addition to synthesizing the general history of rice in the region, focuses on a specifi c population of Upper Guinea Coast residents – the Diola of Guinea-Bissau – as they confront the challenges of a dramatically altered environmental and economic landscape. Th eir experiences are unfolding at a time of revitalized attention to agricultural development in Africa, particularly under Rice and Revolution 175 the auspices of the New Green Revolution for Africa. Part Two then examines this resuscitated eff ort to address the plight of African farmers. By fi rst setting the stage with an ethnographic portrayal of a rice-based society coming to terms with profound changes in its natural, social and religious world, I hope to give readers a sense of the severe limitations of high modernist and antipolitical development approaches to addressing the complexities of agrarian change and rural poverty in postcolonial Africa.1

Part One: Sacred Rice After a few months of residency in a Diola village in north-western Guinea-Bissau, I was deeply immersed in a life where rice dominates one’s actions, preoccupa- tions, even dreams. I had harvested ripe rice at the height of the dry season, lugged baskets laden with freshly cut rice from the paddies to the village, helped pound and winnow rice at my adopted family’s home, and cooked rice over wood fi res in large pots of heavily salted water. I had eaten rice at least three times a day, every day, sometimes served with small fi sh or a sauce of boiled hibiscus leaves, but mostly plain rice – kutangu, as it is called in Crioulo – morning, afternoon and night. I had eaten such rice not just in my daily meals but also in ceremonial contexts, when it was prepared in enormous pots and distributed among participants who gathered in small groups around a shared tin bowl. I had seen unhusked rice used to decorate funeral grounds, strung on cords connecting gi- gantic cottonwood trees and hung in bouquets around the central platform where the corpse was seated. Small sachets of rice often encircled a young girl’s waist at a neighbourhood dance, and celebrants at intervillage wrestling matches wore delicately balanced bundles as headdresses. I had discussed rice with my neighbours and friends, or rather, listened as they spoke endlessly of rice, sometimes in technical terms (seed variations, irrigation methods, transplantation practices), sometimes in worried tones (‘there’s not enough rice to go around anymore’; ‘our granaries are empty’) and sometimes in metaphorical tropes (‘our money is rice’; ‘rice is our life’). Rice is omnipresent in Diola economic, social and symbolic life. It is the centre of social gossip; people regularly discuss whose supply is abundant and whose is depleted. Rice is the medium of exchange during life-cycle redistributive processes such as weddings, funerals and initiations. And rice is the ticket to ritual power, as spirit shine ceremonies require abundant expenditures of one’s crop. Diola lives, like those of most rice-growing people in this region, are permeated by rice. Growing, eating, displaying, wearing, discussing and revering rice. It was ubiquitous. When I closed my eyes at night, panicles of rice swayed behind my eyelids. Scholars of the Diola have consistently off ered rich portrayals of this rice- oriented society. Even when rice is not their intended subject, its presence still pervades their pages (see e.g. Almada 1964 [1594]; Baum 1999; Coelho 1953 176 Joanna Davidson

[1669]; Lauer 1969; Linares 1970, 1981, 1985, 1992; Mark 1985; Pélissier 1966; Th omas 1959, 1963). As Linares sums up, ‘Rice is the symbol of ethnicity, of continuity, of all that is traditionally Diola. … Rice keeps men tied to the land, village-bound, and wholeheartedly peasant’ (Linares 1970: 223). I myself did not go to the Diola region of northwest Guinea-Bissau to study rice. And yet, ten years after my fi rst Diola rice harvest, I still fi nd myself returning again and again to rice, not only as a central organizing feature of Diola social life but as the ‘thing’ that mediates their encounters and exchanges with others, as well as their refl ections and reassessments of themselves. Diola see rice as part of a covenant with their supreme deity, Emitai, in which they work hard to cultivate the crop and Emitai sends rain to nourish it (see Baum 1999). Th roughout my fi eldwork in 2001–2003 and during my return visits over the past eight years, I saw this covenant in action in Diola farmers’ arduous eff orts in the rice paddies, their commitment to well-organized work groups at crucial moments in the agricultural cycle, their regular libations – and occasional costly sacrifi ces – at spirit shrines to propitiate their gods and bargain for rain, and their careful child-rearing practices that socialize young people into an ethical life of hard work and no theft (see Davidson 2007, 2009). I also heard these sentiments regularly expressed in anthropomorphic and deistic references to rice. ‘Th e rice is pregnant’, my work associates would note as we walked through a paddy. ‘Rice’, my neighbours would tell me, ‘is sacred’.2 Th is concept of sacred rice is the centrepiece of Senegalese fi lmmaker Ous- mane Sembene’s portrayal of French colonial brutality in southern Senegal in his 1971 fi lm Emitai. After conscripting young Diola men to fi ght in the French army in World War II, colonial offi cials demanded locally produced rice as a tax from the Casamance Diola villagers so adept at producing a surplus. Despite the otherwise caricatured portrayal of Diola religious life – elders sit amongst human skulls and sacrifi ce animal after animal in order to appease their gods, while their wives are held at gunpoint under a scorching sun until they hand over their rice – Sembene did, I think, capture a central dilemma in Diola (and probably other rice-cultivating peoples’) social and spiritual life. In addition to quite accurately portraying the physical rhythms of rice cultivation, Sembene shows Diola struggling (and divided) over a thorny conundrum: How can they give away their rice, which is sacred to them? And how could their gods abandon them – the humans that propitiate them – for the sake of rice? Th is is encapsulated in perhaps the most problematic scene, when the dying ‘chief’ argues with the gods about what is more valuable: Rice? Th e people? Th e gods themselves? Th ese questions never get answered and might still be asked today, although under very diff erent circumstances. In Sembene’s fi lm, Diola were pressured to give their surplus rice to the French colonial authorities, which they insisted was a violation of their principle of ‘sacred rice’. In contemporary Diola-land in Guinea-Bissau, the main problem is that Diola can no longer grow enough rice – Rice and Revolution 177 not only to meet their ceremonial needs, or to have surplus for a potential tax, but even to feed their families. Diola villagers are on the frontlines of global climate change. Within the past thirty years, declining rainfall, desertifi cation and widespread erosion in northern Guinea-Bissau have increasingly challenged Diola villagers’ ability to provision themselves through the wet rice cultivation practices that have long defi ned them as a people. Th ese environmental factors have combined with neglectful and disadvantageous government policies and programmes regarding rural development, diffi cult marketing conditions, and diminished labour capacity due to out-migration of youth, which all have worsened conditions in rural rice-growing regions of the country. By the time I arrived in Guinea-Bissau in 2001, most Diola villagers’ granaries were empty. Many people regularly told me ‘We used to be able to do this’, referring to the complex technical, social and ritual system by which Diola produce, consume and revere rice. ‘Now we cannot.’

Rice as a Total Social Phenomenon Sacred rice is, above all, the idiom through which Diola talk about rice. Trans- lated into anthropological terms, rice for Diola is a total social phenomenon in the classic Maussian sense. It mediates all social spheres and holds together the contradictions across them. It is the means through which people present themselves to themselves and others. In some senses, rice as a total social phenomenon could reﬂ ect one of the hallmarks of African agriculture more generally: the ‘intense dependence of a people on a single crop’ whatever that crop may be (Harlan, De Wet and Stemler 1976). Th at is, whether it is yams, sorghum, millet, or rice, the people cultivating these crops tend to be singularly and intensely focused on them.

African agriculture is characterized by a rather unusual number of dominant crops. In Arabic ’aish means ‘life,’ and in the Sudanic savanna the word is applied to sorghum – the staﬀ of life, the source of sustenance. Life without sorghum is unthinkable. To the north in the Sahel, ’aish means ‘pearl millet.’ Life itself depends on pearl millet and pearl millet alone, in that ecological zone. To the west around the Bend of the Niger, the word may be applied to rice by some Arabic speakers. Certainly in West Africa, from Senegambia to central Ivory Coast, a meal without rice is considered no meal at all. Th e same intense dependence of a people on a single crop is found in the yam zone. Existence itself depends on yams. In diﬀ erent parts of the continent other dominant crops are ensete, tef, and fonio. … Th e current dependence of some people on maize and others on cassava indicates that dependence on single crops does not take long to establish. (Harlan et al. 1976: 14; see McCann 2005 for more on maize in Africa) 178 Joanna Davidson

Diola villagers regularly invoke a recent past in which their mode of production yielded an abundance of surplus paddy rice, often stored for decades and used in great quantities for ceremonial purposes. Th e decrease in rice stores has already had signifi cant consequences for Diola ritual activities. Most shrine ceremonies require copious paddy rice expenditures: ‘sack rice’ (as Diola call imported rice), even if it could be purchased in suffi cient quantities, would not be acceptable in most ritual contexts. Beyond its impact on ritual life, diminishing crop yield has led to changes in what might be called the Diola social security system, particularly with regard to vulnerable segments of Diola society like widows. Given the already strained situation of monogamous households providing for their members, the levirate (botunabu) practice in which a widow and her children are customarily absorbed into her husband’s brother’s household has all but disappeared, leaving increasing numbers of widows to fend for themselves on the margins of society.3 And at the most basic level, decreased rice in Diola-land has contributed to increased anxiety around sustenance, so that many Diola villagers face a worrisome quotidian experience and a more intense working life in what was already a taxing labour regime. In some ways, questions about Diola and their dominant crop are in the same scholarly vein as other studies of the rise of particular crops and the way they shape desires and dramatically shift economic and political structures (Mintz 1985; Kurlansky 2002; McCann 2005).4 Th ese writers focus on the role of a single crop and its power to transform social, economic and cultural conditions across vast and previously less connected parts of the globe.5 Other scholars have provided rich portrayals not just of sugar, salt and maize, but also of the power of rice in particular, both across the globe and within specifi c regions. Th e history of rice is often told with a focus on its abundance and adaptation across various ecological and political landscapes. Within West Africa too, scholars have focused on the importance and innovation of rice in enabling societies in this region to survive and often thrive (Carney 2001; Hawthorne 2003; Fields-Black 2008). Such accounts solidify the historic roots of rice in the Upper Guinea Coast and attest to the sophisticated technology that supported its growth as the region’s dominant crop. Th ey are, for the most part, rice success stories. The Upper Guinea Coast is cast as a site of agricultural and social innovation, whether in Hawthorne’s (2003) account of how, in the face of the Atlantic slave trade, a stateless society had the resilience to develop the internal social institutions that enabled it to increase rice production; or in Carney’s (2001) epic portrayal of the contribution of West Africans – especially women – to the Americas through their ‘rice knowledge system.’ It is now well established that West Africans domesticated and cultivated rice for thousands of years, long before the arrival of the Europeans who were assumed to have brought both the seeds and know-how of rice agriculture to West African coastal peoples. Th e last several decades have seen a ourishingfl of Rice and Revolution 179 infl uential studies of rice in Africa and in Atlantic studies more broadly, rectifying many of the biased assumptions in previous understandings – both scholarly and popular – of rice’s origins and importance as located exclusively in Asia. A considerable literature now attests to rice’s important role in shaping societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Th e weight of evidence – historical (Pélessier 1966; Lauer 1969; Alpern 2008), botanical (Portères 1970, 1976; Harlan et al. 1976), clima- tological (G. Brooks 1985), geographical (Cormier-Salem 1999), archaeological (Linares 1971, 2002), linguistic (Fields-Black 2008), political-ecological (Rich- ards 1985, 1986) and genealogical (Carney 2001, 2004) – restores rice history to its proper place in West Africa, even if the extension of such accounts across the Atlantic into New World systems continues to be debated (Eltis, Morgan and Richardson 2007). Th at rice was grown 3,500 years ago in the Niger delta; that it diff used to two secondary centres; that both the plant and the people adapted to particular saline, insalubrious, unpredictable conditions to thrive in a challenging landscape and develop a range of rice planting methods; that rice production even increased, in some cases, in spite of the ravages of the Atlantic slave trade (Hawthorne 2003) – all of this is now, unlike the semiaquatic rice plant itself, on terra fi rma. Carney’s (2001) watershed study consolidates such evidence to demonstrate Africans’ roles in developing both the domesticated rice plant, Oryza glaberrima, and the highly sophisticated water management systems, cultivation techniques and trademark tools involved in successfully growing the crop in a tricky and unpredictable environment, long before European infl uence in the area. Building on Wood (1974) and Littlefi eld (1981), Carney breaks the narrative of African rice out of its relegated confi nement to West Africa as something of ‘local importance and antiquarian interest’ (Sauer 1993), and provides African rice with a travel narrative as compelling as the more familiar accounts charted for the Asian cultigen. As in Asia, African people moving across the oceans to diff erent ecosys- tems – whether of their own volition or not – brought with them both the seeds and the skills to transform environments, economies and societies anywhere they went (and anywhere they left behind). Putting aside her more controversial extension of this argument, which focuses on the infl uence of this indigenous African ‘rice knowledge system’ in the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade,6 I want to take up a point emphasized by Carney and others writing in her wake regarding the development of rice agriculture in West Africa, and ask about its implications today. Carney (2001), Hawthorne (2003) and Fields-Black (2008) each emphasize the innovative qualities of rice cultivation in the Upper Guinea Coast as a technologically ingenious approach in a challenging mangrove ecosystem, particularly in terms of its sophisticated crue/décrue method of water management (Carney 2001: 40–46; Fields-Black 2008), and its socially innovative responses to the pressures of the Atlantic slave trade (Hawthorne 2003). Whereas these authors aimed to establish 180 Joanna Davidson a solid historical basis for rice-oriented cultures and their continual adaptation to myriad challenges – Mandinga expansion, European slave raiding, colonially enforced cash cropping, shaky transitions to independence and throughout all, a fl uctuating set of environmental conditions and unpredictable pattern of rainfall – my experience as an ethnographer among Diola rice cultivators in postcolonial Guinea-Bissau leads me to ask: what now? For the past ten years I have seen Diola respond to the decrease in rain and rice in varied, mostly highly individualized ways. Th e average household is able to produce only enough rice to last three months, and when you ask most Di- ola how they get by, they respond by saying ‘kuji-kuji, son’, referring to what chickens do to fi nd insects and grubs for their day-to-day survival. Th ey scrape together what they can to buy a kilo of imported Asian rice, which, though it cannot be used for ceremonial purposes, has become acceptable to eat. Another common strategy among adult Diola – those with families to care for – is to work harder and to scold (and often punish) those who shift their primary allegiance away from rice cultivation and towards other livelihood strategies (see Davidson 2009). Some Diola have invested in spirit shrine ceremonies to contract for more rain. Others have sought new religious identities and institutions – Catholic and Protestant are the two options available in the area – that enable both access to new resources and a religiously sanctioned opt-out from ‘traditional’ strictures that require exclusive devotion to rice. Increasingly, Diola families invest in schooling for their children and pin their hopes for the future on their children’s academic success. But in Guinea- Bissau, school is a fragile thing to pin one’s hopes to. Some unexpected hurdles have complicated the practice of sending adolescent girls to schools outside the village: most have come back as pregnant drop-outs. Meanwhile, boys’ studies are often interrupted by political turmoil or lack of economic wherewithal, and as they wait around in the capital for a resumption they not only cannot contribute their much-needed labour back home but also become far more likely to lead precarious lives, particularly in a nation where drug traffi cking is ever more entrenched and off ers one of the only viable economic alternatives to an arduous (and food-insecure) rural life and a paralyzed (and unfulfi lled) postsecondary school urban life. All of these strategies refl ect eff orts among the Diola to confront their collective dilemma: who are we without our rice? For now, Diola are hungry – some of them literally so, as they struggle to feed themselves and their families; others more metaphorically, as they search for new paths to social security through schooling, new religious institutions and escape. Comprehending this hunger as it connects the physical body to the social body contributes to our understanding of the complex dynamics of agrarian life. But beyond a mere academic exercise, this understanding has implications for development policies and practices targeted at Diola and other agrarian populations on the Upper Guinea Coast and Rice and Revolution 181 beyond. Th e interpenetration of rice across all social domains requires any development response – particularly in increasingly food-insecure regions – to take into account the totalizing quality of rice agriculture. Th e concomitant challenge for scholars is not just to articulate this complexity, but to do so while pragmat- ically engaging both the anxieties of present-day rice farmers and an agricultural development discourse that is disproportionately focused on effi ciency and quantity.

Part Two: Th e Institutional History of Rice Science and Agricultural Development Th e outlook on the future of rice in West Africa must, of course, go hand in hand with a historical view of the decreasing self-suffi ciency of what was once called the Rice Coast, which leads to an examination of the shift from staple to cash crops during the colonial era in Africa, and the continued de-emphasis on agricultural development in the postcolonial period. Once defi ned by its abundant rice production, the Upper Guinea Coast has seen a dramatic increase in rice imports over the past half century. Colonial policies shifted African agricultural eff orts away from food crops for local sustenance towards cash crops for Euro- pean consumption. Newly independent African nations in the 1960s and 1970s declared their intention to attain self-suffi ciency in food production, framing such a goal as a pragmatic approach to meet the demands of population growth and address Africa’s marginal position in the international market on the one hand, and as a political and symbolic reversal of the colonial project on the other. But since independence, the increased infl uence of the cash economy, combined with rapid demographic shifts and a concomitant focus on urban development, have conspired to keep rural development eff orts in a marginalized position vis- à-vis large-scale improvement schemes, and food imports have only increased. Th e trend of importing basic staples, especially rice, accelerated rapidly in the early 1970s owing to two main factors: the Sahelian drought, and the availability of cheaper rice on the international market due to surplus yields in Asia – the fruit of the new intensive approaches and high-yield seed varieties of the Green Revolution. Th us, in the independence era, ‘the amount of rice imported into West Africa increased from 276,000 tons/year in 1960–1964 to 496,000 tons/ year in 1970–1974, an increase of 80%, at a time when total world rice exports were unchanged’ (Aw 1978: 71). Despite Guinea-Bissau’s stated commitment to boost rice self-suffi ciency (Da Silva 1978), its rice imports have steadily increased since independence (Temudo 2011).7 To answer post-independence Africa’s call for self-suffi ciency in rice production, the West African Rice Development Association (WARDA), based in Mon- rovia, Liberia, was established in 1971 and later joined the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). WARDA, one of several agri- 182 Joanna Davidson cultural research and development centres dedicated to improving the yields of African farmers, was the only one focused exclusively on rice. Since its establishment in 1971, WARDA has been a moveable feast, relocating from Liberia to Côte d’Ivoire to Mali and fi nally to Benin in response to the eruption of violent confl icts across this swath of West Africa. In 2009 it offi cially changed its name to Africa Rice Centre (AfricaRice). Tracing WARDA’s movements across West Africa, as well as its shifting position within the wider world of international agricultural development, would illuminate much about the politics of postcolonial development in West Africa, although such an exploration is beyond the scope of this chapter. Th ough conscious of the particularities of the environmental, political and cultural factors that condition rural development work in West Africa, WARDA largely follows the model of other agricultural research and development entities by focusing on the technical aspects of growing rice. Th e characteristic approach of agricultural development since the Green Revolution, and even before, has been to apply the latest innovations in agricultural science – especially plant breeding, fertilizers and irrigation – to impoverished rural communities across the world, and move agricultural production from sustenance to surplus to sale. Generally couched in the development discourse of poverty eradication and food security, the goals are primarily quantitative – higher yields, more crop per drop – and even though the latest iteration of the Green Revolution for Africa has incorporated the language of sustainability and gender into its rhetoric, the creation of high-yield seeds continues to be the holy grail of rural development. WARDA’s chief contribution in this vein has been the development of New Rice for Africa (NERICA) varieties – the fi rst successful hybrids of Oryza sativa and Oryza glaberrima – which are being distributed to rice cultivating populations across the continent. NERICA was fi rst named ‘wide crossing’ to highlight the achievement of bringing together two rice species from widely divergent sources (Walsh 2001). It also refl ects a shift in attitudes towards African indigenous rice, long considered inferior and marginal by rice breeding programmes. As Walsh explains, looking back on several decades of rice breeding eff orts, WARDA scientists realized that their gains had been limited by the concentra- tion on imported grains, so they began to ‘reclaim glaberrima’ – analysing the long-ignored indigenous rice species to see what could be learned from its long history and adaptation to West African conditions (Walsh 2001). A senior plant geneticist at WARDA described the process as ‘time consuming, but … worth doing because eventually we are going to get an interspecifi c hybrid that will combine important traits between glaberrima and sativa’ (Walsh 2001: 65). And it did indeed pay off , at least in terms of scientifi c recognition, when WARDA won the prestigious King Baudouin International Agriculture Research Award for NERICA in 2000. Hopes began to soar regarding the possibility of revitalizing rice production across the continent. Rice and Revolution 183

In some senses, NERICA brings the epic journey of rice full circle. It is now generally accepted that Oryza sativa and Oryza glaberrima shared a common pro- genitor, and that the genus Oryza originated on the Gondwanaland superconti- nent before becoming widely distributed across the tropics. From this image of a common origin in a geologically conjoined world, followed by a long history of independent domestication and cultivation to the point of attempted crosses between the two species – O. sativa and O. glaberrima – that proved sterile, and to a subsequent ‘colonization’ of African rice by the Asian variety in glaberrima’s homeland, we have fi nally circled back to a conjoining (though of a diff erent kind, conjured in the laboratory) that brings Asia and Africa together again in the microcosm of a single grain, rhetorically touted as the ‘best of Africa mixed with the best of Asia’, on which hopes of feeding a hungry world are pinned. ‘Th e NERICA rice varieties,’ states a recent comprehensive publication on rice, ‘off er great hope to the next generation in Africa’ (Badawi et al. 2010: 404). It is precisely this hope that is fuelling a major set of international development initiatives directed squarely at rural Africa: the New Green Revolution for Africa. Th e remainder of this chapter will explore some of the premises, programmes and players that constitute this reincarnation of the Green Revolution.8 Drawing on the previous sections that developed a Maussian understanding of rice in Diola and other agrarian societies, I will outline some of my concerns about this new – and rapidly expanding – trend in development policy and practice for postcolonial Africa. Th e recent revitalized focus on agriculture is framed as a corrective to the largely failed urban-based rapid-modernization approach that has dominated international donor policy and practice for many decades. Spearheaded by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and funded by philanthropy giants such as the Gates Foundation, the architects and planners of the New Green Revolution for Africa seek to fulfi l Africa’s post-independence promise of self-suffi ciency and turn Africa’s image around from a ‘basket case to a breadbasket’ (Cartridge and Leraand 2006: 109). Gates programme offi cers and Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) offi cials speak enthusiastically about this New Green Revolution’s potential to succeed in Africa, where so many other development eff orts have failed (AGRA-Alliance 2014). In one AGRA plant geneticist’s recent summation: ‘For a long time, I don’t think we knew how to solve Africa’s agricultural problems. But the answer is a second green revolution’ (Rieff 2008: 30). African Green Rev- olution planners have attended to some of the more egregious errors of the last Green Revolution and integrated some general changes in public consciousness and development practice since the 1960s and 1970s into its goals and methods. For instance, far more attention is paid to environmentally sustainable practices, the stated objective of focusing on women and the stated intention to ‘learn from farmers’. Almost every document and speech on the Green Revolution in Africa 184 Joanna Davidson is careful to point out the ‘specifi cally African’ challenges in undertaking such eff orts, often emphasizing Africa’s ‘diversity’ and ‘complexity’ of seeds, soil and climate. Other ‘uniquely African’ challenges are often compiled into a laundry list featuring drought, global warming, water shortages, lack of fi nance, local confl icts, political neglect, unfavourable trade conditions, unstable governments, fragile economies and infrastructure, technological stagnation, a weak private sector, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a harsh and often inhospitable climate and environment, and low levels of foreign investment and aid. Despite this long (albeit incomplete) list and the repeated recognition that Africa’s challenges are ‘extraor- dinarily complex and profoundly diff erent’ from those that confronted Asia and Latin America, the core principles and models of the previous Green Revolution remain intact for the ‘genuinely African’ Green Revolution: high-yield seeds, better and more fertilizer, access to markets (AGRA-Alliance 2009). I am concerned about this substantial investment in Green Revolution projects in Africa on a number of levels. On the surface, I am hopeful that renewed attention to rural Africans could be benefi cial, especially given the increasing challenges I presented at the beginning of this essay and the long-standing neglect of African smallholders in national, international and NGO development priorities. But I am worried that much of the New Green Revolution rhetoric echoes some of the more problematic (and ultimately dangerous) assumptions of past Green Revolutions and other attempts at agricultural change in Africa and elsewhere. At the most basic level, African Green Revolution documents tend to treat rural development in Africa as a tabula rasa and demonstrate very little concern with (or even knowledge of) the abundant analyses and attempted (and largely failed) interventions into African rural poverty in the past. Only negligibly do they acknowledge the wealth of scholarship – concentrated in the 1980s – on how post-World War II Africa lost its capacity to feed itself, and more generally on how larger colonial and postcolonial international economic and political systems were among the causes of Africa’s current agricultural problems. Quite the contrary, leaders of the New Green Revolution come across as impatient with such ‘background information’. Jeff rey Sachs and Pedro Sanchez of the Earth Institute – called on by AGRA to develop some of the intellectual muscle for the African Green Revolution – have continually pressed for urgent action rather than deliberate and methodical discussion. Sachs emphasized recently that ‘Africa needs its Green Revolution and it can’t wait. Africa can feed itself if farmers get the inputs they need – what theory are we waiting for? … We have the tools to get the job done’ (Cartridge and Leraand 2006: 122). Th is general impatience is reminiscent of an earlier era of agricultural development work. Buttressed by the belief that rapid widespread action not bogged down by generative criticism or participatory methodologies was justifi ed, given the otherwise imminent starvation of a rapidly increasing population, previous Rice and Revolution 185 agricultural development experts were dismissive of the particularity and complexity of farmers’ expressed needs and desires, often retorting that ‘beggars ought not to be choosers’ (Richards 1985: 124). But rural Africa is littered with the failed schemes of such hurried approaches to agricultural development.

Teleological Development, Again Besides failing to do their homework and dismissing critical perspectives, African Green Revolution adherents repeat a faulty teleological understanding of development. Th e premise behind Green Revolution programmes is that a productive agricultural sector will lead to national economic growth. Th is is often bolstered with historical evidence from eighteenth-century England, nineteenth-century Japan and twentieth-century India (Hazell and Diao 2005; Båge 2008). Kofi Annan emphasized this point in his speech to the delegates at the 2007 Afri- can Green Revolution conference in Oslo: ‘Virtually no country in history has achieved economic progress and improved the lives of its people without fi rst advancing agriculture. Th at certainly applies to our continent’ (Annan 2007). Th e proceedings from the fi rst Oslo conference put it even more starkly: Africa is ‘Trapped’ (in poverty) and in ‘Trouble’ (cannot feed its people), and its ‘Time has come. After decades of failed attempts at economic and social development, agriculture has been declared the engine of economic growth and poverty reduc- tion in Africa … Africa has no time to waste’ (Cartridge and Leraand 2006: 28; capital letters in original). Th e argument, then, is that every successful society has had to pass through some kind of agricultural transformation, and that previous development eff orts in Africa failed because they played leapfrog over agriculture and attended to industrial and urban development before their time. In the 2006 Oslo proceedings, a caption underneath a photograph of two African men driving a tractor through a large cultivated fi eld reads: ‘Agriculture is commonly considered a locomotive for economic growth in Africa…’ (Cartridge and Leraand 2006: 42). Africa remains ‘a predominantly agricultural continent’, and ‘neglecting this overarching importance of agriculture’ accounts for Africa’s status as the worst-off continent on the planet (ibid.: 41). So, the thinking goes, if you get agriculture right, the rest (ending hunger and poverty, modernization, economic growth, etc.) will follow. New Green Revolution advocates criticize previous development eff orts that have tried to ‘impose a post-agricultural revolution strategy on Africa before its own agricultural revolution has happened. … Th e lessons from Asia and elsewhere seem clear: Africa needs a concerted eff ort to accelerate smallholder-led agricultural development … only then can the transition to industrialization be expected to succeed’ (Hazell and Diao 2005: 25). Th is teleological approach reinforces an evolutionary development narrative in which each society must pass through the phases that supposedly more ‘advanced’ ones withstood on the road to progress. Not only is this historically 186 Joanna Davidson inaccurate, but it misrepresents Africa as an entire continent ‘not ready, not yet, not quite’ for other kinds of development eff orts. Instead of recognizing a ‘full house’ of variation (Ferguson 1999), New Green Revolution leaders insist that ‘as African countries develop and diversify, the other sectors will become important sources of tradables output and agriculture’s role as the primary engine of growth will diminish. But other sectors are not yet ready to play that role on the scale required’ (Hazell and Diao 2005: 29). Africa must therefore stick to the linear progression of social change: agriculture fi rst, then industry. ‘As countries develop and labor becomes scarcer relative to land and capital, [this leads to] a natural transition towards larger farms and an exodus of small farm workers to towns and nonfarm jobs’ (Hazell and Diao 2005: 29; emphasis added). Th ere is nothing ‘natural’ about this transition. Such thinking not only re- peats outmoded clichés of the move from traditional to modern, rural to urban, subsistence to monetized economy, but also ignores a recent trend in the so-called advanced or ‘post-agricultural’ societies that challenges this linear development model. Faced with increasing evidence that ‘natural’ transitions from small-scale farming to large-scale industrial and commercial agribusiness contribute signif- icantly to environmental degradation, food scares and public health epidemics of obesity and other chronic diseases, Europeans and North Americans are ever more dissatisfi ed with large-scale food production. A spreading movement to return to alternative agriculture is visible in the growth of community-supported agriculture, the Slow Food movement, locavores, the celebrity-like popularity of Michael Pollan and other such trends. Perhaps this is an agricultural revolution in the other sense of the word; that is, coming full circle to an appreciation of local tastes and practices, environmentally sensitive farming and other characteristics that have long been prominent among the rural African peasantry.

Means and Ends; Techniques and Contexts Another problematic aspect of the ‘agriculture-led economic development’ paradigm is that it subsumes agriculture as a means to a more desirable end, deni- grating the value of agriculture in and of itself. A more productive agricultural sector supposedly paves the way to a post-agricultural world (as if such a thing could really exist). As a USAID offi cial noted: ‘If a process like an agriculture revolution works, it explicitly gets people to leave agriculture. It does! You are creating jobs that are more attractive…’ (quoted in Cartridge and Leraand 2006: 103). To be sure, many farmers in Africa and around the world have hopes for their children that include nonfarm jobs. But why preclude the possibility that agriculture itself can be desirable? Th e assumption that agriculture is something to be left behind on the road to progress – something you work your way out of – reinforces agriculture’s low status on the evolutionary ladder and recapitulates the very image that for so long made rural smallholder concerns look ‘unsexy’ to global development agendas (a view that New Green Revolution advocates claim Rice and Revolution 187 they are trying to reverse). From my own work among Diola rice cultivators, it is clear that although Diola farmers often complain about their declining capacity to sustain their households, they are proud of their continued hard work in the rice paddies. Even those with supposedly more desirable jobs, like teachers, identify fi rst and foremost (and proudly) as farmers. By regarding food production as ‘unspectacular’, Green Revolution proponents continue to ‘misunderstand the nature of both the agriculture and the politics of communities where food production is a major interest’ (Richards 1985: 116). Agriculture is not only devalued as a means to an end but reduced to a set of techniques, as something to be tinkered with and fi xed. Although not sexy to developers, agriculture is like sex in the Foucauldian sense of the care of the self: it is a practice that can be practised (i.e. improved). With the right inputs – science and technology, seeds and fertilizers – agriculture can be transformed. Th e overriding approach of the Green Revolution (past and present) is primarily biological and technological, and operates under the assumption that agricultural processes can be extracted from their political and social contexts. Th is view is encoded in Green Revolution discourse, institutions and practices. Most of its leaders – donors and practitioners alike – are economists or agricultural experts (or both); there are few if any social scientists (let alone anthropologists, let alone small-scale farmers) in their ranks.9 Th eir approach to agricultural transformation ignores the long history of social and political circumstances that help explain why African agriculture is experiencing diffi culties, even as it occludes a picture of agriculture embedded in complex modes of social organization, moral economies, arrangements of power and religious beliefs and practices. As we have seen for Diola – and as has been documented for other agrarian groups – agricultural work is not simply a means of sustenance but is integrally tied to conceptions of personhood, social relations, ritual obligations and collective cultural identity. Tinkering with any piece of their cultivation practices has signifi cant ramifi cations for all of these realms. Agriculture is necessarily a biological and social process, but the Green Revo- lution’s exclusive emphasis on research and technology sets the social side of this equation aside. Th is bias is built into the elitist research culture of the Green Rev- olution. In the Asian and Latin American iterations, International Agricultural Research Centers concentrated the brightest talents in a single place equipped with the best research facilities, and in so doing removed them from exactly the geographical and sociological contexts where they would be most connected to the needs and realities of farmers, and in which they were meant to implement their scientifi c discoveries. Such practices are replicated in Gates’s support of Cor- nell and other seed research centres and even showcased on AGRA’s website in images of African scientists surrounded by the accoutrements of modern, high- tech scientifi c legitimacy: white lab coats, safety goggles and pristine laboratories lined with neatly labelled beakers. But these environments insulate Green 188 Joanna Davidson

Revolution practitioners from the real-time agricultural environment and on- farm knowledge, practice and experience (both biological and social). Th ey also obfuscate the social and political aspects of agrarian change (e.g. land reform, the social organization of labour and national price setting, to name just a few). Th is may have the unfortunate consequence of repeating the problems and failures of previous applications of ‘pure science’ to agricultural challenges. Beyond seed science, one of the innovations New Green Revolution leaders are most excited about is the development of a corps of agro-dealers to bring high-yield seeds and improved fertilizer – what used to be called the biological package – to isolated, rural farmers.10 Replacing the infamous extension agent as the travelling salesman of the Green Revolution, these agro-dealers would be culled from the existing merchants who peddle their wares in outlying villages, thus solving (or at least circumventing) the problems presented by the lack of an African transportation infrastructure. But the assumption that the existing petty-merchant class can sell new seeds and other agricultural products (and even train farmers how to use them) exposes a serious misunderstanding of social and ethnic relations in parts of rural Africa. In the Upper Guinea Coast, farming populations generally regard the petty traders who would be recruited into the agro-dealer corps with deep misgivings and mistrust, and certainly do not recognize them for their knowledge of agriculture. I was often told a well-known rural legend about sneaky peddlers (they are always Fula in the Guinea-Bissau version of this story) who sold glass marbles to gullible rice cultivators, claiming that if they were planted and tended to, they would grow into coveted glass bottles after the rainy season. Th is anecdote is often told to highlight the naiveté of ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’ farmers, or to explain the roots of the enduring animosity between landowning farmers and itinerant merchants, or to prove that such merchants are inherently untrustworthy – or, usually, some combination of these. Many similar stories abound, testifying that relations between farmers and would-be agro-dealers are already tense. Any investment of funding and expectations in agro-dealers as the conduits through which newly developed high-yield seeds, fertilizer and agricultural know-how will reach rural farmers and transform agricultural productivity further exposes the naiveté – or at least the lack of attention to on-the-ground social relations – of Green Revolution architects.

Scientifi c and Indigenous Knowledge One of the key resolutions of the fi rst African Green Revolution conference in Oslo is to ensure ‘targeted research and transfer of Science and Technology to farmers’ (Oslo Conference 2006; capital letters in original). Other resolutions, re- dressing previous Green Revolution gaps, include commitments to crop diversity and the role of women in agriculture. But the emphasis is unmistakably on bringing science and technology to the ‘unknowing’ African smallholder. Again, such an approach carries forward the perspective in which African farmers occupy Rice and Revolution 189 an earlier stage of evolutionary history, and claims that ‘the key to agricultural development in Africa lies in “technology transfer” – the importation of “appropriate” agricultural inputs from tropical regions held to be more “advanced” on the evolutionary scale’ (Richards 1985: 43). Along with the prejudicial implications of such a view, the continued belief that laboratory science leads agricultural innovation is countered by countless examples of agricultural researchers reinventing traditional African agriculture by, for instance, ‘discovering’ the value of West African farming techniques like ‘bush burning’, integrated use of valley and upland holdings, intercropping and land-rotation fallowing. Science has often followed such innovations rather than led them. As Paul Richards notes, ‘high technology’ initiatives throughout the colonial and postcolonial era had minimal and often counterproductive impact, and their failures were remedied – in numerous cases from Nigeria, Sierra Le- one, Liberia, the Gambia and Senegal – by reinstating local cultivation practices (Richards 1985; see also Richards et al. 2009; Nuijten et al. 2009; Off ei et al. 2010). Th e reincarnation of the Green Revolution for Africa has attended to some of the previous biases against indigenous knowledge in its commitment to ‘listen to farmers’. As an AGRA programme offi cer states,

Th ere is also a lot to be learned from the farmer. You develop ideas about what you think the farmer should do to solve their problem, but maybe that is not the farmer’s problem. … So, for us agriculturists, we may be telling the farmers what chemical to use or how to control the storage pests or how we can develop a resistant variety, but the farmers know what they have been doing and they may have abandoned a method that works. … So if you have an interaction between you and the farmer, you will come to learn what the farmer really wants. (AGRA-Alliance 2009)

While these lessons learned from the hubris of the previous Green Revolution refl ect what I believe are sincere intentions to incorporate indigenous knowledge and smallholders’ concerns into agricultural development projects (even though, as mentioned above, other dynamics of Green Revolution culture and practice militate against this very process), such a bland and general intention to ‘learn from farmers’ exposes yet another naïve assumption on the part of Green Revolution agro-economists: that indigenous knowledge is ripe for the picking, readily available to whichever plant geneticist or grant portfolio manager might ask about it. But one of the reasons behind the continuing stereotype and misrep- resentation of the ‘conservative risk-averse farmer’ is that agrarian communities have ‘often misled outsiders into thinking that not much was going on’ (Richards 1985: 111). It is often to farmers’ advantage to keep a low profi le and maintain the image of a subsistence backwater: such a projected image fends off the tax 190 Joanna Davidson collector and others interested in taking a share of what is often a thriving trade in foodstuff s (see Richards 1985). Even more so, some agrarian societies have deeply ingrained formal and informal communicative strategies that make access to agricultural knowledge – or really any relevant knowledge regarding farmers’ circumstances – extremely diffi cult to obtain. Various rice farming groups expend a great deal of time and energy managing knowledge about themselves and about the natural and supernatural world (Ferme 2001; Sarró 2009; Davidson 2010). Th eir commitment to a particular scheme of information fl ow – based largely on secrecy, evasion and restraint – challenges even the most culturally sensitive development policies and practices, and certainly makes ‘learning from farmers’ more complicated than the AGRA programme offi cer would lead us believe.

Conclusions My goal in outlining some of my concerns with the New Green Revolution for Africa is not to dismiss eff orts to reach out to African farmers or, more broadly, address pressing problems of entrenched rural poverty in Africa. Rather, I want to point out some ways in which current well-funded, powerful eff orts to shape the agenda for accomplishing these aims might benefi t from a closer analysis of the assumptions underlying such endeavours, whether encased in the rhetorical, institutional or programmatic aspects of African Green Revolution initiatives. Although the language is more sophisticated, these New Green Revolution approaches smuggle in many of the last Green Revolution’s teleological and evolutionary models of social change, and – despite regular references to ‘local knowledge’ and ‘political will’ – continue to treat agriculture as a set of techniques outside complex social, political and religious contexts. As Pedro Sanchez from the Earth Institute confi rmed: ‘Th e African Green Revolution is not a proposal, it’s on, it’s happening now. Agriculture is back on donors’ and governments’ agendas and it is being acknowledged as one of the key factors in Africa’s future’ (Cartridge and Leraand 2006: 109). Given that the train has already left the station, the question then becomes how anthropologists and others concerned about the more problematic aspects of Green Revolutionary practice can engage it constructively – particularly when interlocutors are resistant to criticism and eager to claim the moral high ground of poverty eradication – without being either relegated to the role of naysayers or mired in the ‘ineff ective particularities of ethnographic detail’ that continue to make anthropologists ‘bystanders in the wider arena of discussions about “Africa”’ (Ferguson 2006: 3). Will social scientists once again be consigned to the task of documenting the validity of indigenous knowledge for an audience that is enamoured with (and has the resources and power to bring about) change through technology, ‘pure science’ and market access? How can we best bring anthropological and historical Rice and Revolution 191 knowledge to bear on what will be signifi cant changes – and perhaps major opportunities or high-stakes follies – for rural Africans? Th e story of rice and rice-oriented societies on the Upper Guinea Coast in- vites us to take a very long view of historical change. Rice was domesticated 3,500 years ago as an innovative response to a drying climate. Mangrove rice cultivation in particular represents an ingenious way to engineer an otherwise inhospitable landscape. Even the pressures of the Atlantic slave trade catalysed – in some cases – the consolidation of otherwise dispersed populations and led to an increase in output of rice. As Ohnuki-Tierney notes for the Japanese, ‘rice paddies objec- tify time’ (1993: 133). Th ey evoke seasonality in the rhythms of planting and harvesting, they speak to cyclical patterns of rain and drought, and they express the history and memories of ancestors in their lineage-based tenure and their well-maintained ridges. What they will look like and represent in the future is unclear, especially given the odds of climate change, geopolitical marginality and a skewed globalized economy. As stated above, one of the goals of the African Green Revolution is to turn Africa from a ‘basket case to a breadbasket’ (Cartridge and Leraand 2006: 109). Rather than being ‘genuinely African’, this aims to make Africa more like Iowa. An immediate countermeasure would involve shifting our attention away from old chestnuts like the impressive ‘adaptive’ strategies of rural smallholders and towards a better understanding of the conditions in which agricultural innovation thrives, by building on Paul Richards’s call to ‘stimulate vigorous “indigenous science” and “indigenous technology”’ (Richards 1985: 12). But a next step would involve moving beyond a science narrowly conceived on the basis of the origin of the scientist. A ‘genuinely African’ Green Revolution is not about enabling Africans to occupy positions in pristine laboratories, but it could be about recon- ceptualizing the character of science itself. Th e nature of the science that has undergirded Green Revolutions from eighteenth-century Europe to 1970s Latin America and Asia is a classic example of Scott’s (1998) notion of high modernism in science. It is characterized not only by its constant confi dence that science and technology (and resolute reliance on the expertise of scientists and bureaucrats) will attend to problems in the natural and social world, but also by its indiff erence to cultural, historical and social complexities and particularities. By narrowly focusing on a single problem (agricultural production), black-boxing uncertainty and complexity, and generally overlooking or externalizing negative by-products, high-modernist science has continually shown itself to be irrelevant, inapplicable and ultimately resulting in failure more often than not (see S. Brooks 2010). It is also a deeply antipolitical approach to agricultural development (Ferguson 1994). If we opt not to follow that script for another chapter in Africa, perhaps Scott’s call for a ‘métis’ vision of practical knowledge points us in the right direction. Th e experiences of Diola rice farmers and the totalizing quality of rice in their societies remind us that Af- 192 Joanna Davidson rican agricultural transformation requires a commitment to engage in agriculture not as a means to an end, but as a practice integrally linked to and informed by culture, ecology, politics, social organization and other dimensions of agrarian life not readily encapsulated by the tunnel-vision goals of a high-modernist and antipolitical approach to development.

Joanna Davidson is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research in Guinea-Bissau has focused on Diola rice cultivators and their responses to environmental and economic change. She is the author of Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Notes 1. Th is essay is a revised version of an article published in June 2012 as ‘Basket Cases and Breadbaskets: Sacred Rice and Agricultural Development in Postcolonial Africa’, Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAFÉ) 34(1): 15–32. 2. Many rice-cultivating people consider rice sacred in diff erent ways (see Grist 1959; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993; United Nations Offi ce at Geneva 2004). 3. Th e dynamics around shifting levirate practices and the status of widows are quite complex, and I do not have room in this chapter to detail them. For now, what is important is to acknowledge that decreasing rice supplies play an important part in the changes in social organization concerning widows. 4. McCann’s (2005) study of maize provides further evidence in support of the observation that a hallmark feature of African agriculture is its loyalty to a single crop, even one of recent provenance. 5. I am inspired by, and hopefully building upon, such works. But my similar focus on a single crop – rice, in this case – does not lead me to the same type of dramatic, far-reaching arguments about the transformation of civilizations and geopolitical order across multiple continents. Although my background discussion of rice – its origins, travels, widespread use and future expectations – does touch upon some of these themes, my aims are perhaps less ambitious and more intimate by comparison. 6. Eltis et al. argue against Judith Carney’s ‘black rice’ thesis (and against Peter Wood’s and Daniel Littlefi eld’s work, on which Carney’s builds) by insisting that ‘there is no compelling evidence that African slaves transferred whole agricultural systems to the New World; nor were they the primary players in creating and maintaining rice regimes in the Amer- icas.… Furthermore, a close look at the slave trade from an Atlantic perspective suggests no evidence that the rice culture of South Carolina, Georgia and Amazonia was any more dependent on skills imported from Africa than were its tobacco and sugar counterparts in the Chesapeake, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Th e evolving transatlantic connections, the age and sex composition of the slave trade, the broad shifts over time in transatlantic slaving patterns, and the structure of slave prices are all largely explained without reference to a supposed desire on the part of rice planters for slaves with rice-growing expertise developed in Africa’ (Eltis et al. 2007: 1335, 1357). 7. As Temudo (2011: 309) notes, ‘In recent years, rice imports in the sub-region have been increasing from an annual growth rate of 5.54 per cent in 1991–2000 up to 10.51 per Rice and Revolution 193

cent in 2001–2005. Despite research and development eff orts focused on the selection and diff usion of modern varieties, rice consumption has been increasing faster than production and the self-suffi ciency ratio decreased from 0.78 in the 1990s to 0.58 from 2001 to 2005’. 8. Much of the agricultural research on tropical food crops for the Latin American and Asian Green Revolution was carried out under the auspices of an international research network coordinated by CGIAR and funded largely by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, with additional fi nancing from the World Bank and multinational corporations. Known as the CG System, it comprised ten International Agricultural Research Centers, some of which are continuing their work with new injections of fi nancing and purpose for the African Green Revolution. 9. See Cernea (2005) for an excellent analysis of the ‘uphill battle for social research’ in CGIAR centres, as well as the lively discussion (‘Special Section’ 2006; Fernando 2007) in the wake of Cernea’s article. 10. See Koopman (2012) for another critique of this approach, as well as other problematic aspects of AGRA’s eff orts. See also Mittal and Moore (2009) for a report on African farmers’ responses to AGRA.

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Sarró, R. 2009. Th e Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sauer, J.D. 1993. Th e Historical Geography of Crop Plants: A Select Roster. Boca Raton: CRC Press. Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sembene, O. 1971. Emitai. Films Domirev. ‘Special Section: Peer Commentaries on Michael Cernea’s “Studying the Culture of Agri- Culture: Th e Uphill Battle for Social Research in CGIAR”’. 2006. Culture and Agriculture 28(1): 1–31. Temudo, M.P. 2011. ‘Planting Knowledge, Harvesting Agro-Biodiversity: A Case Study of Southern Guinea-Bissau Rice Farming’, Human Ecology 39(3): 309–21. Th omas, L.V. 1959. Les Diola (Parts I and II). Dakar: Mémoire de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, 55. ———. 1963. ‘Essai sur quelques problèmes relatifs au régimes foncier des Diola de Basse- Casamance (Sénégal)’, in D. Biebuyck (ed.), African Agrarian Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 314–30. United Nations Oﬃ ce at Geneva, World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Or- ganization of the United Nations. 2004. Rice Around the World in 300 Recipes: An Inter- national Cookbook. Geneva: UN Bookshop. Walsh, J.R. 2001. Wide Crossing: Th e West Africa Rice Development Association in Transition, 1985–2000, Soas Studies in Development Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wood, P.H. 1974. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Knopf. Chapter 10 Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement Youth and Women in the Moral Economy of Patronage in Postwar Liberia and Sierra Leone William P. Murphy

Introduction Survival and self-protection often require an acute recognition of the sociopolitical structures creating suff ering. Th is social fact is especially signifi cant for people displaced during a war – that is, people displaced either within their country (IDPs) or outside the country (refugees).1 War-aff ected groups face the challenges of rebuilding social lives when they return to exited communities, whether villages, towns and neighbourhoods or the national community as a whole. (E.g. a refugee might return to the national community but avoid her local community of origin because of the oppression of harsh patriarchy.) Returnees must confront the structural problems that led to the violent conditions precipitating their exit in the fi rst place. ‘Return’ produces a critical sociopolitical moment for scrutinizing social injustices existing before, during and after a war – thereby creating a special postconfl ict ‘public sphere’ in Habermas’s (1989 [1962], 1974) sense of citizen discourse and reasoning about political institutions and their consequences for socioeconomic inequality. Even as returnees face the constraints of an impoverished postwar social and economic infrastructure, hopeful possibilities arise for creating future institutions with greater fairness and opportunity. Alternatively, for the entrepreneurs of power and domination, the period of ‘return’ and the process of rebuilding the social fabric of a war-wracked country off er opportunities to reimpose the political privileges and economic monopoly of a governing elite of local and national ‘big men’.2 Capturing international humanitarian resources for postconfl ict rehabilitation programmes, for example, is one core strategy for rebuilding patronage power and wealth (see Hoff man 2004 on the 198 William P. Murphy eff ect of humanitarian aid on war strategies in the Liberian and Sierra Leone civil wars, and Fanthrope 2003 on postwar strategies; cf. Chambers 1979 for the eff ect of humanitarian aid on refugee strategies generally). Th e logic of rebuilding ‘big man’ patronage structures can be described with a poignant phrase that Labonte (2011) used to summarize the social anxieties of returnees in the case of Sierra Leone, namely, the problem of ‘elite capture’ of postconfl ict governance and wealth.3 Th e impoverishment of the postconfl ict political economy intensifi es social dependency on and subordination to ‘big man’ institutional structures (including the reinforcing structures and ideologies of patriarchy and gerontocracy) and creates special incentives for ‘big man’ to build new pyramids of patron domination and client dependency in the new spaces of postconfl ict opportunity (on the theoretical logic of patronage pyramids see Martin 2009: Chap. 6). Christensen (2012), for example, in her study of patronage strategies in local postconfl ict government by former military commanders and their clients, concluded by off ering the important generalization that postconfl ict state formation and governance in Sierra Leone largely involves ‘the redirecting of militarized patrimonial networks for post-war politico-economic purposes’ (Christensen 2012: 74–75; see also Christensen and Utas 2007 and Utas 2012: 19). Th is essay thus begins with a specifi c social anxiety about elite capture that is expressed in the local moral perspective on ‘non-refoulement’ – the right of not returning – and articulated by those worried about their vulnerability to injustices stemming from the patronage capture of resources when they return to postconfl ict communities. To illustrate this anxiety, consider a song recorded on cassette by a young Liberian band that I heard on the streets of Monrovia in 2004, only a year after President Taylor had left for exile in Nigeria and during the beginning of the new interim government. Th e song poetically and musically critiqued the lived experience of the postconfl ict crisis of reasserted patronage power and privileges. A key phrase in it went ‘the only thing that has changed is the silence of the guns’ (to paraphrase what I heard). Th is referred to the end of the civil war in 2003 when two rebel groups were fi ghting President Charles Taylor, who himself had started the original, ‘fi rst’ civil war in December 1989 against then President of Liberia Samuel Doe. After the phrase, ‘the only thing that has changed is the silence of the guns’, the singer explains that big man politics hasn’t changed: the big men still have the fancy cars, fancy houses and beautiful girlfriends. Th e big men referred to were members of the interim government – including former leaders of the rebel groups – who now were in positions of power. Th is song refl ects a central theme in postconfl ict discourse, namely, the danger that big man patronage politics will be reproduced in the postconfl ict period of social reconstruction, repeating old institutional problems of inequality and the suff ering they cause. Th e relationship between social structure and suff ering is captured in the idea of ‘structural violence’ (Farmer 2003), but the broader methodological principle Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 199 is that the structural properties complicit in social suff ering, such as the institution of patronage, are mediated and identifi ed in the cultural vocabulary of social discourse, including the language of protest songs. Th is principle derives from social theory’s insistent task of trying to fi nd ‘a better way for the vocabulary of the actors to be heard loud and clear’, to borrow Latour’s (2005: 30) phrase. Th e analytical value of this ‘vocabulary’ in the study of social injustice rests on the ontological fact that morality and law are ‘situated in a linguistically structured form of life’ (Habermas 2003: 37). Much of the cultural vocabulary of social injustice in postconfl ict Liberia and Sierra Leone focuses on failures in the moral economy of patronage reciprocity. Th ese failures, in turn, are seen by victims as justifying choices whether or not to return to, or to exit, particular local or national communities. In international law, these choices are interpreted in terms of the right of non-refoulement – one’s right not to be forced to return to a community one exited because of persecution. Th e argument here treats this international legal norm as a heuristic for thinking about local social injustices faced by postconfl ict returnees. Conversely, it also seeks to give ethnographic specifi city to this international ideal by analysing a specifi c institutional form producing those injustices, namely, ‘big man’ patronage.

Human Rights and Local Justice Many scholars of this West African region have recognized the special political space of postconfl ict in Liberia and Sierra Leone as creating an intense interaction between human rights discourse and local moral idioms about injustice (e.g. Archibald and Richards 2002; Ferme and Hoff man 2004; Fanthrope 2005; Shaw 2005, 2010; Allie 2008; Boas and Hatloy 2008; Kelsall 2009; Sesay and Suma 2009; Anders 2012; Abramowitz and Moran 2012). Th is essay addresses similar questions, but in terms of a specifi c international legal norm: the right of non-refoulement, as well as the related right to exit a community.4 Having the ‘right to exit’ a community because of various forms of persecution is the reverse of ‘non-refoulement,’ the right not to be forcibly returned to communities where persecution continues to be a danger. It is characteristic of human rights thinking (as well as the anthropological imagination) to manifest concern for those who are politically vulnerable to persecution: ‘Human rights … articulate the relationship between individuals and groups within a community and their relationship with others, particularly those with power and authority’ (Clapham 2007: 161). A key diff erence, however, separates the transnational legal emphasis on crimes of individuals from local cultural assessments of unjust consequences of particular institutional and organizational forms. Kelsall makes a related point at the conclusion of his study of the war crimes tribunal of the Special Court for Sierra Leone: ‘international law doctrines were unable properly to capture the nature of authority in Sierra Le- 200 William P. Murphy one’ (Kelsall 2009: 260). Victims of social injustices are often better sociologists than international lawyers whose gaze is typically narrowed by legal doctrine to a focus on individual misdeeds. A lawyer cannot indict in court, or imprison, an institution. Th e transnational legal lens of focusing on individual accountability thus limits outsiders’ ability to ‘see’ institutional forms of local injustices relevant to the human rights of exiting and non-refoulement.5 Scott’s (1998) metaphor of ‘seeing’ to represent a horizon of limited understanding arising from nation-state perspectives applies also to the transnational legal lens.

In refugee law and policy, there are often ‘systematic reasons for igno- rance’ in the form of oversights and biases towards refugees, for political or other reasons (e.g., urban bias towards rural refugees) – creating ‘what the eye does not see’ by overlooking the social strategies, institutional constraints and lived experience of those coping with forced migration. (Chambers 1979: 382)6

Nevertheless, in response to unfair aspects of postconﬂ ict social life, shared moral and intellectual sympathies can emerge to create a special form of ‘value generalization’ – between transnational human rights and local cultural idioms – that represents a mutual focus on aspects of unfairness in particular sociopolitical contexts (see Joas 2013: Chap. 6 on the concept of value generalization in social theory, as formulated in the work of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons). Th is social fact creates the broader ethnographic challenge of examining social spheres of value generalization from the point of view of diﬀ erent social positions in a community, such as youth versus elders, or men versus women. Th is essay addresses that challenge.

Social Justice for Returnees: Transnational and Local Frames of ‘Seeing’7 Studies of the intersection of international human rights and local cultural beliefs often contrast ‘rights discourse’ of international law with other modalities of justice-making, such as reconciliation, communal sharing and mutual care, viewed as characteristic of local cultural practices (see Merry 2006: 133ff .). Th e analytical emphasis on the ethic of mutual care (and communal sharing) rather than human rights, however, can create a romanticized view of forms of social connectedness between individuals that overlooks the sober ethnographic fact that diff erent forms of social connectedness may be the problem and source of social injustice (Kiss 1999).8 Moreover, this dichotomy can defl ect attention from the manifold cross-cultural ethics of avoiding unfair treatment in various forms of social connectedness, for example, youth talking about the injustices of elders. A more encompassing theory of culture would underscore ‘the ways local cultural Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 201 practices and beliefs interact with global legal principles and the importance of seeing these in context’ (Merry 2006: 133; Goodale and Merry 2007; see also Clarke 2009 on the legal pluralism of micropractices of sociocultural diff erences in the discourse of rights and justice). A good example of this interaction is the shared moral spirit manifest in the right to exit and right of non-refoulement. Th e 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains several articles that set out ideas related to the right to exit. Article 13 speaks directly of the right to leave your country, Article 14 identifi es the right to fi nd asylum from persecution by moving to another country, Article 15 defi nes the right to change your nationality and Article 18 speaks of the right to change your religion. Th is legal concept of ‘exiting’ has both spatial connotations, in the sense of the right to physically leave one’s community, and what might be called existential connotations, in the sense of the right to diff erentiate yourself in some way from your community’s cultural order of beliefs and values. Th e right of ‘non-refoulement’ – the reverse of having a ‘right to exit’ – has a noteworthy legal history in human rights doctrine and refugee law. Th e right of refugees ‘not to be forcibly returned to countries where they face persecution’ on account of race, religion, nationality, social group membership, or political opinion was clarifi ed in international legal conventions on refugees in 1933 and 1951, and further developed as fundamental international jurisprudence in additional legal instruments, such as the Convention against Torture adopted by the United Nations in 1984 and ratifi ed in 1987 (e.g. Adelman and Barkan 2011; Weissbrodt and Hortreiter 1999; for some analyses of African cases, see Kuruk 1999 on Liberian refugees in Ghana, and Virmani 1999 on Uganda). Th e legal principle of ‘non-refoulement’ is an ideal focal point for examining the local/global relationship as it pertains to the life of returnees to a postwar society. Consider, for example, that the legal vocabulary of non-refoulement derives etymologically from the French word ‘refouler’ (‘to send back’ or ‘to turn away’), but it can also evoke connotations in the Anglo-Saxon language sense of ‘foul’, that is, as something rotten, unclean, corrupt or off ensive to the senses. Th ese English connotations are not justifi ed etymologically, but they stimulate the thought experiment of asking what is socially noxious and unhealthy from the point of view of returnees. Th e next two sections suggest an answer in the structural form of big man patronage and its moral economy in the postwar politics of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Patrimonial Patronage in Civil War Patrimonial politics formed the prewar conditions contributing to the violent confl ict in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Th is political structure was not a suffi cient cause of the civil war, but it did provide insurgency leaders with ideological jus- 202 William P. Murphy tifi cation (e.g. the idea of fi ghting against a corrupt government) and motivate some participants. Meanwhile, the actual day-to-day logic of the violence, in its microdimensions of patrimonial aggrandizement, had more to do with the social control of civilians and territorial resources than with overturning a corrupt, patrimonial government. Th e civil war was a site where diff erent patrimonial regimes – the government and rebel insurgencies, as well as factionalized rebel groups – battled for this territorial and social control. Th e ‘crisis of the patrimonial state’ is a canonical argument in the literature on causal mechanisms leading to the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Some fundamental texts in this scholarly literature (explicitly or implicitly confi rming this political pattern) include, to cite just a few from a voluminous list, Abdullah (2004), Bolton (2012), Coulter (2009), Denov (2010), Duyvesteyn (2005), Ellis (1999), Ferme (2001), Gberie (2005), Hoff man (2011), Keen (2005), Kelsall (2009), Jackson (2004), Moran (2006), Murphy (2003), Peters (2011), Pham (2004, 2006), Reno (1995, 1998) and Richards (1996 and 2005a) and Utas (2005a, 2005b, 2012); also see McGovern (2011) on the interrelated civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. Th e locus classicus for conceptualizing key institutional features of this political form is Weber’s (1978: Chap. 12) analytical model of patrimonialism (see Murphy 2010 for an application of this model to Upper Guinea Coast political and economic history, and Murphy 2003 for its application to the rebel regimes). Th e discretionary, autocratic power of big men in the patrimonial logic of governance is often generalized as a causal mechanism in the logic of the ‘failed’ or ‘weak’ state syndrome (see Williams 2011: Chap. 3 on ‘neopatrimonialism’ in African confl icts).9 Th e broad idea of patrimonial political system can be constructed with ethnographic specifi city by imagining a pyramid of nested, dyadic patron/client relations emerging from political strategizing in various social contexts of severe dependency, inequality, economic need and power aggrandizement. In addition, the term ‘patrimonial patronage’ – patronage in governance structures at diff erent territorial levels (nation, chiefdom, town, village, etc.) – can be used to dif- ferentiate practices of ‘social patronage’ in nongovernmental domains of society, that is, families, households and the variety of social groups in civil society generally (youth gangs, trade unions, etc.).10 Patronage and clientelism as concrete practices are best conceptualized as sociopolitical strategies (Piattoni 2001), a conception that in turn justifi es a method of attending to the language used to evaluate the eff ectiveness and success – and the morality (fairness or unfairness) – of those strategies in particular social and political contexts.

Ethnographic Sketch Postwar Liberia and Sierra Leone provide two powerful cases of institutional change and continuity of patrimonial structures resulting from civil war and its Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 203 aftermath. Th e second civil war in Liberia, locally called ‘World War II’, began in 1999 and opposed two rebel groups – Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia – against the government of Charles Taylor, who in December 1989 had started the fi rst civil war, or ‘World War I’, with his National Patriotic Front of Liberia insurgency. Taylor became president in 1997 but was exiled to Nigeria in August 2003. His departure came to symbolize the end of both civil wars and later the war crimes and crimes against humanity that characterized the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. His election in 1997 – contested under the threat of war restarting if he was not elected – and his government rule until his departure in 2003 exemplifi ed the logic of ‘elite capture’ of national economic resources and political power characteristic of patrimonial systems. In March 2003 Taylor was indicted by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone for war crimes and crimes against humanity.11 In April 2012 in a trial held in Th e Hague, he was convicted on eleven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including crimes that had gender and age dimensions such as rape, sexual slavery and use of child soldiers. In May 2012, he was sen- tenced to fi fty years in prison. Th e civil war in Sierra Leone (declared offi cially over in 2002) had been started in March 1991, with the support of Charles Taylor, by Foday Sankoh, leader of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). He died in 2003 before he could be brought to trial by the same Special Court for Sierra Leone, which indicted him on seventeen counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Th e rebel regimes of both Taylor and Sankoh exemplifi ed the structural vulnerabilities characteristic of ‘warlord’ patrimonial organizations, such as coercive means of discretionary authority enabling immunity from traditional moral constraints, a system of authority that was fractionalized (and factionalized) by competition among ‘big man’ warlords, and so forth. Th e rebel-group domination imposed on captured territories and civilian populations replicated the prewar patrimonial logic and ideology of social control, though with the addition of more extreme coercive means for controlling labour and monopolizing economic resources. Th e harsh use of subjects for forced labour in these warlord political regimes contributed to the war’s immense devastation of local and national infrastructures, and to extensive violence against civilians. Using the words of one young ex-combatant (from a Sierra Leone civil defence force), most civilians, aware of the RUF rebels’ predations on civilian lives and property, eventually viewed them as ‘just armed bandits’ and ‘thieves’, despite their lofty-sounding revolutionary ideology (quoted in Peters and Richards 1998: 200). Another major indicator of the devastation and disruption of a civil war is the large-scale movement of refugees and internally displaced people, which creates one of the key analytical problems – and humanitarian challenges – for understanding postconfl ict societies: namely, the need to understand the socio- 204 William P. Murphy political practices of trying to rehabilitate community life and rebuild physical infrastructures of war-torn villages and towns, and the need to reconcile ex- combatants, both male and female, with their families and communities.12 Nev- ertheless, many displaced persons, especially youth and women, have been un- willing to return to their original communities and customary ways of life. Th eir hesitancy refl ects a social and existential crisis of ‘institutional doubt’ about postconfl ict politics (to borrow a term from Habermas 1973: 15).

Analytical Puzzle: Th e Moral Economy of Patrimonial Patronage In the political economy of the prewar, civil war and postwar periods in Liberia and Sierra Leone, reciprocal obligations were often defi ned by a normative order regulating dependency relations with big man patrons within a patrimonial political system. Typically, this cultural order of politics codifi es obligations of exchange in which patrons provide economic aid and political protection while clients and subjects provide labour, political loyalty and economic tribute. Th ese obligations and expectations constitute a moral economy of patronage. Th e idea of a ‘moral economy’ – namely, a moral code regulating economic transactions between those with authority and their economic dependents – is most often associated with the work of E.P. Th ompson (1971; see also Scott 1976 and Davis 1973; for application to African history, see Austin’s 1993 analysis of the moral economy of witchcraft). Th ompson’s use of the term ‘moral economy of the poor’ in his historical analysis of food riots in eighteenth-century Britain follows Marx’s preoccupation with the critique of and resistance to the injustices of capitalism. Th is concept seems to turn Weber on his head by focusing on the legitimate use of violence by the poor and less powerful, rather than on the legitimacy of the monopoly of violence by the powerful in a political community. But the idea actually overlaps with Weber’s theoretical emphasis on the cultural order of meaning and morality as constitutive of economic transactions (and of legitimate violence). Th e relationship between morality and economic transactions is clear in Weber’s theory of patrimonialism: the traditional moral order places a ‘“customary” limitation on economic exploitation’, and breaches in this customary moral order through ‘excessive demands – transcending tradition – could shake their [subjects’] loyalty, which had a merely traditional basis’ (Weber (1978: 1010). A morality of reciprocity between the powerful and the less powerful charac- terizes local theories of justice documented in the classic ethnographies of African law (e.g. Bohannan 1957; Gluckman 1955). Also characteristic of such systems, however, is the potential for transforming reciprocity into harsh extraction when the traditional, customary moral code becomes only a weak constraint on the aggrandizement of personalistic, autocratic power. Th is structural vulnerability was a central principle in Weber’s argument about the relationship between morality Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 205 and power in patrimonial systems – a principle often confi rmed by cross-cultural cases of big man systems, for instance, Sahlins’s (1963: 293) classic argument about Melanesian big men, who often substitute ‘extraction for reciprocity’.13 Th e excesses of big man extraction are often represented in the Upper Guinea Coast region by the trope of ‘eating’ (Bolton 2012) and the related trope of a ‘big belly’ (see Shepler 2011 for the case of Sierra Leone; for a generalization of this trope in understanding African politics, see Bayart 1993). In addition, the kinship tropes of reciprocity provide a moral language for critiquing the failures of big man patronage (Murphy, in press). Patrimonialism as a political system exhibits a fundamental structural tension between the morality of reciprocity and the abuses by power-holders making excessive demands on subjects. Reciprocity in what might be called ‘benign’ patrimonialism tempers the logic of domination and dependency because a moral code specifi es ‘the subjects’ claim to reciprocity, and this claim “naturally” ac- quires social recognition as custom’ (Weber 1978: 1010). Hence ‘the master too “owes” something to the subject … according to custom and his own self-interest’ – that is, the patrimonial ruler’s moral obligations include ‘external protection’, ‘help in case of need’, ‘humane treatment’ and ‘particularly a “customary” limitation of economic exploitation’ (Weber 1978: 1010). Such obligations and customary limitations constitute the normative elements of a moral economy of patrimonialism.

Moral Economy and the Language of Injustices Th e moral economy of patrimonial patronage provides a local vocabulary for subordinates to critique the injustices of power-holders in terms of a cultural principle of ‘justice as fairness’ in asymmetrical social relations.14 Th is principle is a core idea in philosophical refl ections on justice, most notably in the infl uential formulation of John Rawls (1971). ‘Justice as fairness’, in his formulation, means that social and economic inequalities are acceptable if they satisfy two conditions: fi rst, equality of opportunity to acquire social positions and political offi ces; and second, use of positions and offi ces to the greatest benefi t of the least advantaged members of society (see Sen 2009: 59ff ., for an exegesis and critique of Rawls). Th is philosophical formulation helps clarify the moral economy of obligations in patrimonial patronage. Consider, for example, that the fi rst condition of equality of opportunity is not met because patrimonial patronage is, by defi - nition, a form of elite capture of political and economic resources. True, this institution can be seen ideally to meet the second condition when big man authority is used to fairly redistribute resources to the community. Th e morality of redistribution, however, is highly vulnerable to political strategies of selectively channelling resources to build up a cadre of followers and clients in order to shore up autocratic power through big man patronage – to the detriment of 206 William P. Murphy the majority in a community. Accumulation of power and privileges via these strategies in the patronage network of patrimonialism leads to the social injustice of impoverishment and political marginalization among the ‘least advantaged members of society’. Th e second condition of ‘justice as fairness’ is also violated in patrimonial politics, especially when resources and wealth in people are coercively created through monopolies of military power (as in rebel insurgencies controlling people and territory). For most people, the consequence of this type of political system is destitution and suff ering. Moreover, building up a personalistic, discretionary authority with immense military power leads to a characteristic crisis of patrimonial politics – which Weber (1978: 1055) typifi es in the image of ‘centrifugal forces’ of instability and confl ict inherent in this political form (see Murphy 2010 on the centrifugal forces in the political and economic history of the Upper Guinea Coast). Th e moral economy, in other words, breaks down under the pressure of changes in the political economy that enable the monopoly of political and economic resources, notably through increased use of coercive resources for social control, for example government repression or rebel insurgency control of captured territories. Th e next section outlines the breakdown and failure of the moral economy of patronage – in the form of both patrimonial patronage of governance and the social patronage of everyday life outside government institutions – in the postconfl ict lives of youth and women.

Social Crisis and Malaise Th e crisis of the neopatrimonial state is also a ‘crisis of youth’, a phrase often used in African political discourse as well as academic discourse in African studies. In the title of Peters’ (2011) book on the Sierra Leone civil war, the phrase evokes the social dependency and marginalization of youth as intensifi ed under the political and economic instabilities of the big man system. As Hoff man (2011: 8) notes, global media captured this crisis of youth with evocative captions like ‘Sierra Leone Is No Place To Be Young’ and references to war-torn Sierra Leone such as calling the country a ‘teenage wasteland’. Similarly, the plight of women in the civil war would justify the analogous caption ‘Sierra Leone Is No Place To Be Female’. Th is media language can be translated into the theoretical language of patrimonial patronage. Neopatrimonialism is also a ‘crisis of women’. Women are especially vulnerable, in diff erent structural ways, to the excesses of a big man political system that justifi es forms of female subordination and servitude (and even, during the civil war, sexual slavery). Girls, moreover, have diff erent socioeconomic trajectories for rebuilding lives – and face diff erent structural constraints – than boys in postconfl ict communities, as many studies of Liberia and Sierra Leone have emphasized (e.g. Utas 2005b; Coulter 2009; Denov 2010; Moran 2010; Shepler 2014; Van Gog 2008).15 In general, the central theme in Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 207 these studies is the emergence of a new cultural and political space for youth and women to negotiate, redefi ne and rework prewar social identities and relations (e.g. Richards 2005b; Coulter 2009; Knörr 2010; Shepler 2010; Hoff man 2011; Peters 2011).16 Youth and women, however, confront a general social ‘malaise’ pervading the realignment of social relations during confl ict and postconfl ict (see Macek 2009 for the case of civil war and postconfl ict in Bosnia). In postconfl ict Liberia and Sierra Leone, anomie – like creative agency – is typically structured by the social conditions of subordination and marginalization within reproduced patronage structures and practices (see Braithewaite et al. 2010 on the social dynamics of anomie in postconfl ict reconciliation in Indonesia). In the case of Sierra Leone, Denov (2010: 86), for example, emphasizes that the disruption inherent in civil war entails a dismantling of relationships within local communities, resulting in a profound loss of confi dence in one’s self and social world (Denov 2010: 86). Coulter (2009: 251), who studied female ex-combatants and ‘bush wives’ of rebel commanders in Sierra Leone, argues in terms of gender and generational relations that men and women as well as parents and children ‘no longer really know what to expect from one another’. Knörr (2010: 226) underscores this social malaise in the special urban context of Krio identity processes in Sierra Leone: the violence of the civil war ‘has caused deep feeling of suspicion and distrust concerning one’s own people and institutions’. Shepler (2014) points to broader theoretical implications about the cultural constructions of childhood and children’s rights by focusing her ethnographic analyses on youth agency in the postconfl ict Sierra Leonean context of structural change and challenge. And Abramowitz (2014) delineates the trauma of war as an intersection of the social and the psychological and explores the eff ects of this mental health nexus on Liberian postconfl ict individual and collective healing (see also Murphy 2015 on the sociopolitical complexities of ‘community reconciliation’ as a modality of psychological healing). Many young people and women did not want to return to their villages and communities because they feared subordination under prewar customary forms of authority. Youth worry about gerontocratic processes controlling their labour and services. Women worry about patriarchal power subjugating them. Both worry about the charismatic authority of big men and their personalistic, discretionary power to subjugate and marginalize. Both articulate a kind of ‘legitimation crisis’ surrounding big man patronage in postconfl ict sociality.17 As Menzel (in press) shows for postconfl ict Sierra Leone, this crisis is manifest in the tension between complicity (out of necessity) in the patron/client logic, and criticism of this logic as producing barriers to societal and individual betterment. Similar structural tensions between big man patronage and clientalist dependency shape the reproduction of discursive critique in postconfl ict diasporic communities (see Steinberg 2011 on resettled Liberians in New York City). 208 William P. Murphy

Youth In impoverished postconfl ict conditions, youth are especially dependent on patronage assistance because families and kin groups lack the resources to provide adequately for their children’s future and the government fails to provide basic social services. Denov and Buccitelli (2013) analyse several important forms of social dependency in the case of postconfl ict Sierra Leone, for example relations with an older male who acts as a fi ctive older brother, or relations with an older woman who acts as a fi ctive older sister (respectively called ‘bra’ and ‘sisi’ in Sierra Leonean Krio). Th is exchange relation requires that young men or women provide services, for instance performing domestic chores or helping with marketing. In addition, peer groups and gangs provide cross-cutting support, serving to protect youth against mistreatment by a patron; however, they also add another form of dependency to the postconfl ict social structure that needs to be navigated (Denov and Buccitelli 2013). Newell’s (2012) detailed analysis of youth navigating the moral economy of patron/client relations in the gangs of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, exemplifi es the reliance on patronage structures in marginal social spaces lacking government control and services. Th e fi ctive kin ties of ‘bra’ and ‘sisi’ represent a form of ‘social patronage’ operating outside governmental political patronage but follow a similar logic of employing resources of wealth and authority to incorporate the labour and loyalty of clients and dependents. Social patrons are, in a sense, ‘small’ big men and women. In an impoverished postconfl ict country, even limited power and wealth can be suffi cient resources for their holder to act as a ‘social patron’. And the labour pool of potential dependents is extensive. Poor youth have little choice but to secure the protection and economic assistance of a patron. Despite dire dependency, youth recognize unfairness in this patronage relationship and can very clearly articulate the diff erence between a good and an evil patron, according to a moral economy of patronage. While youth are expected to render services, obedience and money (e.g. from market trade), harsh Dickensian patrons are common, as this youth describes:

My former bra was very wicked. … He would kick me and slap me and beat me in public. People would try to intervene, but he would yell at them to go away. He would say: ‘Don’t get involved, he is my borbor [boy]!’ (Denov and Buccitelli 2013: 11–12; see also Denov, Doucet and Kamara 2012)

Th us social patrons and powerful political patrons alike are evaluated by the same moral economy of reciprocity that accepts social subordination when there is fairness in the asymmetrical exchanges between patron and client. In some major towns, another notable example of social patronage strategies in the postconﬂ ict political economy is the motorbike trade unions made up Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 209 primarily of ex-combatants (e.g. Peters 2007 and 2011). Th e postconﬂ ict narrative of the motorbike trade includes episodes of big men using their patronage power to treat ex-combatants as little more than serfs who are dependent upon patronage resources to gain access to a motorbike and a share in the business. Denov documents in ethnographic detail the harsh forms of social dependency in the patronage logic operating within this particular economic space. In one case of economic patronage, the ‘boss’ (patron) who owns the motorbike that an ex-combatant rides and uses to make his living treats the client harshly if he does not bring in enough money, as the ex-combatant explains:

My present trouble is that I don’t have a bike of my own and am just making money for someone else [my boss]. … My boss owns the bike. He can ask me to leave at any time because there is really no guarantee in the relationship. … Sometimes when I’m unable to raise 25,000 Leones from the bike, he abuses me verbally and insults me. … He threatens that he will take the bike from me, as if our relationship is just tied around the bike. … All he cares about is the money. … He is arrogant and disrespectful. (Denov 2011: 200–1.

Besides criticism of the ‘bad’ social patrons of everyday life, a second discursive type of critique arises when youth question their subordination under patrimonial authority in governance structures, and the various secular and religious forms of patriarchy and gerontocracy legitimating those structures. Peters’ studies (2005, 2007, 2010, 2011) are especially rich in documentation of Sierra Leonean ex-combatants’ critique of youth subordination under the patrimonial authority of chiefs and elders (see also Richards 1996; Fithen and Richards 2005). Th e group discussions documented by Archibald and Richards (2002) also provide extensive data on the discourse about the injustices of patrimonial practices, such as chiefs and elders co-opting postconfl ict humanitarian assistance. As one villager lamented: ‘Th rough injustice we have turned our young people to rebels’ (Archibald and Richards 2002: 346; see also Utas 2005b). Such discourses ‘confi rm the salience of local debate about a “generation gap”… and both youth and elders’ groups ‘refer to young people quitting the village and becoming “footloose”, due to heavy fi nes’ imposed on youth by chiefs and elders (Archibald and Richards 2002: 346). Explicit comments about this generation gap clearly identify chiefs’ and elders’ abuse of patrimonial authority. According to one elders’ group, ‘the heavy fi nes levied by chiefs on youths have led to many leaving the villages’ (Archibald and Richards 2002: 346). And one youth group observes that ‘Chiefs victimize youth by imposing heavy and unjust fi nes’, and ‘criminal summonses make youths run from the village, resulting in disunity and grievance’ (Archibald and Richards 2002: 347). Extractions of youth labour, debt servitude and ritual subservience produce what some analysts have called ‘judicial 210 William P. Murphy serfdom’ (Mokuwa et al. 2011; see also Peters 2010) – a key institutional feature of harsh forms of patrimonialism and a danger youth try to avoid in postconfl ict social reconstruction. In the unique postconfl ict public sphere of institutional re-evaluations, youth become ‘iconoclasts’ of big man patronage (see Højbjerg 2007 and Sarró 2009 on the iconoclastic structural tendencies shaped by social turmoil and crises in the Upper Guinea Coast region).

Women Women’s special challenge to patrimonial authority and its patriarchal legitimacy – at both family and community levels – in the aftermath of war is a signifi cant feature of postconfl ict discourse about injustice. Many studies, notably Coulter (2009) and Denov (2010), document this structural tension and the extensive discourse of women’s criticism of the oppression and rejection they fi nd in patriarchal households and communities as they try to reconcile with communities after having spent time with rebel groups as abducted ‘bush wives’ or girl soldiers. But subordination to patriarchal household and community regimes is only part of the ethnographic story of women’s lives in wartime and postconfl ict Liberia and Sierra Leone. As Moran (2010: 267) has emphasized for Liberia, ‘women had also held visible, highly authoritative positions in both rural and urban contexts’ before the war. And during the war, as Moran’s recent research on men who did not fi ght in the Liberian civil war demonstrates, women exercised power in subtle ways, such as when senior women took on the role of ‘either sending younger male kin to war or refusing them permission to join the armed factions’ (Moran 2010: 268). Exclusive focus on ‘the discourse of prewar patriarchy’ can obscure the ‘authority of mothers, grandmothers, and aunts to deploy young men’s labor to defense or other tasks’ during the war (ibid.: 268). Th e complexity of power and authority in female roles in traditional Liberian societies, Moran (ibid.: 262) argues, is often neglected in postconfl ict reform projects, which ‘continue to be grounded in static, oversimplifi ed, or locally inappropriate notions of gender’. Th e explanatory idiom of ‘patriarchy’ can essentialize and overlook the multifaceted dimensions of struggle and challenge that women face in a weak postconfl ict political economy (e.g. ibid.: 267–68). Th e analytical goal is not to discard the concept of patriarchy but to clearly specify how the ideology of patriarchy operates as a legitimating mechanism of authority in concrete practices within diff erent social structures and political economies of gender relations, such as when a successful woman becomes a kind of patriarch or big man (cf. Enloe 2005). Women’s postconfl ict discourse about the patriarchal justifi cation for their harsh servitude and suff ering during the civil war, for example, involves a larger discursive critique of big man (i.e. warlord) organizational structures of war making that used women for forced labour and sexual services. Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 211

Research by Archibald and Richard (2002) extensively documents women’s critique of patriarchal and gerontocratic authority in postconfl ict communities (see also Ferme 2001). Regarding the village distribution of humanitarian aid, for instance, women complain that chiefs and elders monopolize the benefi ts of postwar development, preventing fair distribution. In one chiefdom discussion, ‘the women’s group complained that women were marginalized and that “customary law keeps women at the bottom of the social ladder” and “the chiefs grab everything that should be women’s”’ (Archibald and Richards 2002: 348). In this patrimonial logic, law as well as politics become the personal property of chiefs. Some of the loudest and clearest voices against big man patronage in postconfl ict Liberia and Sierra Leone have come from women’s organizations. For example, Leymah Gbowee, whose organization, the Liberian Women’s Initia- tive, helped end the Liberian civil war in 2003, gained recognition worldwide when she won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her heroic work for peace and women’s rights (Gbowee 2011). Similarly, in postconfl ict Sierra Leone women’s organizations were constructed with a ‘broader vision of gender equality and the transformation of prevailing patriarchal power’ (Maclure and Denov 2009: 619; see also Denov 2008). One of the unintended consequences of the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone was the proliferation of women’s groups organizing to challenge, in light of their experience of the wars, the gender norms (and norms of youth subordination) legitimating the patronage institutions reinstituted in postconfl ict society.

Conclusion and Th eoretical Implications Both international human rights eff orts and local critique are often driven by outrage at the injustices of abusive power. Outrage is also the driving force behind much social theoretical work. A canonical example is Marx’s analysis of the abuse of workers in capitalist institutions. Marx off ered a diagnosis of a structural failure to provide workers with a just reward for the products of their labour, as well as a critique of failures in the distributive justice of allocating resources according to individual needs (Sen 2009: x). In intellectual history his work is emblematic of the integration of rigorous social theory and empathy for social justice. Outrage, however, is not the privilege of an intellectual elite enlightened with penetrating perceptions of social injustice – a common idea in Marxist political thought. Rather, a broader moral (and social) theory of justice can be constructed on the human capability (in all its diff erent cultural modes of language and expression) to perceive and reason about social injustices (e.g. Sen 2009). Th is premise encourages methodological attention to the everyday language and critique of unfairness in social life, including special attention to the perceptions of those most vulnerable to the suff ering caused by that unfairness. ‘In a process 212 William P. Murphy of enlightenment, there are only participants’ (Habermas 1994: 101). Th e social theorist or philosopher or international lawyer is only one participant off ering insights enriched by dialogue with those who live the experience of social injustice. Meanwhile, the outsider’s gaze can be limited by ‘not seeing’ forms of repressive political authority (whether national or subnational) that limit the possibilities of public debate and dissent and create a mask of consensus despite widespread, though muted, dissent and dissension (Murphy 1990). Th e consequence is that local social critique – its scope and penetration of institutional patterns of injustice – is overlooked. One methodological key to avoiding this oversight is to fi nd ‘a better way for the vocabulary of the actors to be heard loud and clear’ (Latour 2005: 30). In the case of social injustice, the challenge is to fi nd a better way to broadcast the vocabulary of those most vulnerable to the unjust consequences of institutional practices. Th e methodology of ‘listening’ – with a particular theoretical focus – trans- forms the large questions of postconfl ict social justice into more detailed questions about everyday social practices and the everyday language of rebuilding broken and unjust worlds (see Das and Kleinman 2001 on the everyday lived experience of collective violence, social suff ering and social recovery). More broadly, this methodological assumption is foundational in building a theory of justice, as Amarta Sen shows in his refl ections on the idea of justice:

We could have been creatures incapable of sympathy, unmoved by the pain and humiliation of others, uncaring of freedom, and – no less sig- niﬁ cant – unable to reason, argue, disagree and concur. Th e strong presence of these features in human lives does not tell us a great deal about what particular theory should be chosen, but it does indicate that the general pursuit of justice might be hard to eradicate in human society, even though we can go about that pursuit in diﬀ erent ways. (Sen 2009: 414–15)

Reasoning and debating about injustices is an important part of what it means to be a human being. For anthropologists, the ‘strong presence of these features in human lives’ does not tell us what aspects of institutional and organizational structures produce unjust consequences, but it does encourage a methodological orientation to people’s local discourse and reasoning about the sociopolitical structures leading to those unjust consequences. Despite the variety of ideological justifi cations for causing human suff ering, both the genealogy of human rights and the moral presumption of human dignity and individual worth within that genealogy (a kind of secular ‘sacralization’ of the person) are shaped historically by the human and social response to ‘negative, distressing, traumatizing experiences of our own and others’ suff ering’ (Joas 2013: 6). Th e idea of a secular ‘sacralization’ of the individual, which also Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 213 has roots in Durkheim’s theory of the growth of individuation through modernization (see Giddens 1972), can be refi ned to capture the specifi c negative and traumatic experiences (and injustices) aff ecting particular social types of persons, such as women or youth. Finally, the goal of examining those experiences in the study of social justice derives from two important principles of method and social theory: fi rst, theorists of justice ‘must begin from a concrete understanding of the lives of those about whom they theorize’ (Kiss 1999: 6); and second, ‘exploited and marginalized people may be equally poor, but their diff erences in social position and experience must be taken into account in attempts to diagnose and remedy the injustice of their condition’ (Kiss 1999: 9). Th is essay has attempted to understand such diff erences by taking into account the structural vulnerabilities of youth and women when they return to postconfl ict communities, their language of injustice in reaction to reinstituted forms of big man patronage, and the relation of their moral language to the heuristic model of the international legal norm of non-refoulement.

Acknowledgements I want to thank Jacqueline Knörr, Christoph Kohl and the Max Planck Insti- tute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany, for convening a conference that encouraged participants to rethink their specifi c ethnographic and historical research on the Upper Guinea Coast within a broader perspective linking local, regional and global perspectives. I am also grateful to the Graduate School of Northwestern University for research funds to support my 2004 summer postwar fi eldwork in Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Buduburam Liberian refugee camp in Ghana. I thank participants at the 2010 conference in Halle and at a collo- quium in the Roberta Buff et Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University for their helpful input. I am also indebted to the wisdom and experience of two Northwestern University colleagues who are experts on forced migration – Galya Ruff er and Akbar Virmani – and my summer undergraduate research assistant, Gabrielle Daniels, who diligently surveyed the scholarly legal literature on war crimes as well as refugee law on non-refoulement. Anne Menzel and Erin Moore were helpful interlocutors on the pertinent research issues of youth ambivalence about patronage practices and the relationship of human rights discourse to African girlhood, respectively. Finally, I am grateful to Myriam Denov’s reading of an earlier version of this essay and her helpful suggestions based her own innovative fi eldwork on youth in Sierra Leone.

William P. Murphy is a research affi liate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. He began developing his interest in anthropology 214 William P. Murphy and African studies as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in 1967–68, which then led to doctoral works in anthropology at Stanford University from 1970 to 1976. His early research and publications focused on sociopolitical hierarchies legitimated by privileged knowledge and secrecy, as well as legitimated by fi rstcomer-latecomer historical relations. His current research and writing seeks to integrate Peircean semiotic theory with social theory in order to understand recent transformations in the Upper Guinea Coast, especially violence, civil war and the politics of postwar institutional reconstruction and social justice, and includes ‘Patrimonial Logic of Centrifugal Forces in the Political History of the Upper Guinea Coast’, in Th e Powerful Presence of the Past: Integration and Confl ict along the Upper Guinea Coast (Brill, 2010).

Notes 1. On the legal relationship between the categories of internally displaced persons and refugees, see Lee (1996). In addition, a residual category of displacement include the ‘selfsettled’ (i.e. those who solve their displacement problems without the formal organizational help of a refugee organization or refugee camp). I want to thank my colleague Akbar Virmani, who is also a refugee scholar, for introducing me to this third type of displaced persons. For the Upper Guinea Coast region, Ray’s (in press) research on Casa- mance refugees in the Gambia has clarifi ed the sociopolitical logic of host/stranger relations that shape self-settlement processes. 2. Th e analytical category of ‘big man’ – as well as the term for this institutional state of aff airs, ‘bigmanity’ (see Utas 2012) – glosses the meaning of various key cultural idioms of personalistic authority used in the languages of the Upper Guinea Coast. Such termi- nological conventions illustrate a core methodological principle: namely, social scientifi c concepts are often constructed, implicitly or explicitly, with the data of local cultural idioms used to talk about and represent social reality. 3. Th e phrase ‘big man patronage’, as used in this essay, implies sociological variation in institutional forms of patronage (Martin 2009: 216ff .). 4. Th e terms ‘international’ and ‘transnational’ – as well as ‘global’ – are used interchangea- bly in this essay to designate a legal normative order (and political economy) beyond the nation-state (and subnational communities). In addition, ‘postwar’ and ‘postconfl ict’ are used synonymously here. 5. Legal approaches to individual culpability and anthropological approaches to institutional structures sometimes intersect. For example, understanding the structure of command and control in military organizations helps international lawyers to identify the culpability of leaders in cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity (e.g. see Hagan 2003: Chap. 6 on the legal importance of identifying ‘command responsibility’ in the Foca rape trial for war crimes in Bosnia). 6. I thank my colleague, Akbar Virmani, for this reference in refugee studies. 7. Th e term ‘local’ is often used to distinguish sociopolitical levels within a system of contrasting scales of community, such as the village, town or chiefdom as distinguished from the wider scale of the nation-state or colonial state – or international system. In cultural theory, the term has been used to defi ne a perspective of meaning and interpretation within diff erent circumscribed domains of community (e.g. Geertz 1983). Th e ‘local’ in Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement 215

this sense becomes a standpoint associated with particular structural spaces within a social system. Using the summary defi nition of Shaw and Wardorf (2010: 6), it is ‘a standpoint based on a particular locality but not bounded by it’. Logically, international legal doctrine is ‘local’ in this perspectival approach to codes of meaning in society. 8. In postconfl ict discourse about women’s rights, for example, common rhetorical assumptions can limit social understanding – the ‘seeing’ – of the complexity of women’s social experience and needs by essentializing womanhood as war victim, peacemaker, or community builder (see critique by Schroven 2011). 9. See Pitcher, Moran and Johnston (2009) for a penetrating critique of the misuse of this concept in African studies; see also Eisenstadt (1973) for further clarifi cation on the dif- ference between traditional patrimonialism and modern neopatrimonialism. 10. On youth gangs as patrimonial organizations, see Collins (2011). 11. In adjudicating war crimes and crimes against humanity, a basic structural tension persists between international criminal justice and national amnesty laws. See R. Murphy (2006) for the jurisprudential and political dynamics of this tension in Uganda’s case against the Lord’s Resistance Army. 12. Th e Liberian civil war caused half the population of approximately 3 million to fl ee their homes. Most became internally displaced while approximately 700,000 became refugees in neighbouring countries. 13. Sahlins’s (1963) argument about the politics of Melanesian big men matches the analytical principles in Weber’s model of patrimonialism. 14. Violations of the moral economy of patronage are constituted as social realities by the victims’ construal of the meaning of ‘unfair’ social action in patron-client relations – i.e., interpreting social actions as signs of injustice (for the language and logic of refl exivity in Peircean semiotic theory, see Agha 2007, Lucy 1993, and Silverstein 1993). In this communicative logic, in other words, there is a metapragmatics of social injustice. 15. I thank Mariane Ferme for reminding me during discussions at the 2010 Upper Guinea Coast conference in Halle, Germany to underscore the structural diff erences of gender, which her own work does so insightfully. Another caveat about youth positionality should be mentioned: ‘youth’ is a sociopolitical, and semiotic, construction of shifting meanings, and not a rigid chronological category – a man of 40 years can be a ‘youth’ because of certain attributes of socioeconomic inadequacies (e.g. Durham 2004). 16. Th e analytical ideas of ‘navigation’, ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ are central themes in contemporary studies of youth agency and social structure in Africa, e.g., Christensen, Utas and Vigh (2006), Cole and Durham (2008), Denov (2011), Honwana and De Boeck (2005) and Vigh (2006). 17. Th is is a key term in Habermas’s (1973) theory of communicative practice in political change.

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Steinberg, J. 2011. Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City. London: Jonathan Cape. Th ompson, E.P. 1971. ‘Th e Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50: 76–136. Utas, M. 2005a. ‘Agency of Victims: Young Women in the Liberian Civil War’, in A. Honwana and F. De Boeck (eds), Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 53–80. ———. 2005b. ‘Building a Future? Th e Reintegration and Remarginalisation of Youth in Liberia’, in P. Richards (ed.), No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Confl icts. Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 137–54. ———. 2012. ‘Introduction: Bigmanity and Network Governance in African Confl icts’, in M. Utas (ed.), African Confl icts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks. London: Zed Books, pp. 1–31. Van Gog, J. 2008. Coming Back from the Bush: Gender, Youth, and Reintegration in Northern Sierra Leone. Leiden: African Studies Center. Vigh, H. 2006. Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea Bissau. New York: Berghahn Books. Virmani, A. 1996. ‘Th e Resettlement of Ugandan Refugees in Southern Sudan, 1979–1986: Th e Dynamics of Exodus, Asylum, and Forced Repatriation’, 2 vols., Ph.D. thesis. Evan- ston: Northwestern University. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society, 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weissbrodt, D., and I. Hortreiter. 1999. ‘Th e Principle of Non-refoulement’, Human Rights Law Review 5: 1–73. Williams, P.D. 2011. War and Confl ict in Africa. Cambridge: Polity. Chapter 11 Expanding the Space for Freedom of Expression in Postwar Sierra Leone Sylvanus Spencer

Introduction Sierra Leone, a small country on the Upper Guinea Coast, was colonized by the British, who made it a settlement for freed slaves. Hence, the capital came to be known as Freetown. Th e offi cial language is English, but denizens speak many other ethnic languages; Krio is the lingua franca. At the end of the twentieth century, the country went through a bloody, destructive civil war that puts it in the unenviable group of African states that have been described as ‘dysfunctional’, ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ and given rise to much pessimism about the future of the African continent. Th e gruesome human rights violations that characterized the decade-long civil war became a ‘complex humanitarian emergency’ that captured the attention of the international community in a big way. Th is put transnational organizations in a comfortable position to meddle in the aff airs of Sierra Leone by promoting neoliberal prescriptions for postwar peace building and governance reform. Th e factors that led to state failure and outbreak of civil war in this country were long in the making and rooted in the history and politics of this postcolonial state. Hence, although the impact of external factors like neocolonialism, Cold War politics and world market forces cannot be discounted, internal factors are crucial variables in explaining the nature of the African states and the predicaments they face (Francis 2006: 51–53). Most observers attribute the war to a prolonged period of bad governance manifested in, among other things, political patronage, intolerance of opposing views and marginalization of certain groups (Abraham 2000; Ayissi and Robin- Edward 2000). Since neighbouring Liberia shared a similar history of bad governance, it was not surprising that the rebel war that started there in 1989 spilled over into Sierra Leone in 1991, prompting the formation of an alliance of ‘freedom fi ghters’ from both sides of the border. When the diamond mines of eastern Sierra Leone fell into the hands of the insurgents, they found themselves in a Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 223 better position to generate the revenue needed to fund their military venture through illegal mining and sale of ‘blood diamonds’ to unscrupulous foreign dealers (Hirsh 2001). Richards (1996, 2005), who was one of the fi rst to study the civil war in Sierra Leone, sees it as a crisis of youth: largely illiterate or poorly educated and unemployed youths facing a declining economy and an exploitative and repressive patrimonial regime had little prospect of a brighter future. Susceptible to extremist views, they were potential material for violent mob action. For Richards, it was youths living in the economically harsh and politically oppressive conditions of a rural context rather than disaff ected youths in an urban context (as later put forward by Abdullah and others) that constituted the dynamic force of the rebellion. In accounting for the formation of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the outbreak of civil war in Sierra Leone, Abdullah (2004) highlights the role of ‘lumpen youths’ who, in the harsh sociopolitical and economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s, became more and more alienated and found common course with disgruntled and radical students with whom they fraternized and shared hopes of changing ‘de [the] system’. Peters (2010) described the root causes of the confl ict in Sierra Leone as a highly explosive combination of neopatrimonial state collapse and the disaff ection of marginalized rural youths. Boas (2001) has argued that the wars in Sierra Leone and neighbouring Liberia could fundamen- tally be attributed to an ‘extreme version’ of neopatrimonial politics rooted in a shared history of exclusiveness and marginalization that led to the build-up and later violent explosion of deep-seated hatred. Whereas bad governance, as manifested in political patronage and marginalization, is a common thread running through the above explanations of the civil war in Sierra Leone, Kaplan (1994) claims that the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia were devoid of political motives and driven purely by economic considerations of resource accumulation. Th is view is also shared by Collier and Hoeffl er (2003), who make a distinction between ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’ and assert that the real cause of the civil wars in West Africa is not the loud discourse of political grievance but the silent motivation of greed for economic resources. Hoff man (2007) does not subscribe to such an apolitical view of the civil war in Sierra Leone. He argues that the violence perpetrated in the course of the war was a kind of political speech voiced by people desperate to capture attention and be heard. For Hoff man, RUF rapes, lootings, mutilations and other acts of terror should be looked at as springing only partly from economic motives. Th is resonates with Richards’ point that war may be likened to a violent attempt to enter a conversation from which one feels excluded (Richards 2005: xxiii–xxiv). As an ex-rebel fi ghter puts it, ‘Violence is the only language they [politicians] can understand. Th e more the violence, the more they are prepared to listen and understand.’1 Now that the war is over, frantic eff orts are being made to consolidate the nation’s hard-won fragile peace with the help of the international community, 224 Sylvanus Spencer which has made good governance a precondition for supplying aid and loans to developing countries (Milliken 2003; Neumayer 2003). Promoting the Western model of the right to freedom of expression is considered an important part of this mainly Western-driven governance reform programme. Freedom of expression may be defi ned as the liberty to make known one’s views, feelings, convictions and so on without violating the rights of others or jeopardizing their security. It is also the right to refrain from expressing one’s views as long as this is not due to any harassment or intimidation. It takes diff erent forms like speaking, writing, singing and acting. Th is chapter employs theories, travelling models and translation to critically examine eff orts by transnational institutions (working in partnership with local actors) to promote the right of freedom of expression in a postwar setting. It seeks to scrutinize some of the strategies that are being utilized and to highlight unintended outcomes and contextual challenges associated with the peculiar realities on the ground. ‘Travelling models’ refers to certain globally circulating ideas for tackling (among other things) governance-related problems like underdevelopment and civil confl icts. Often prescribed by Western countries and international fi nancial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, these models are often outcomes of peculiar experiences and discourses in the Western world. Th e freedom of expression model that is promoted as part of Sierra Leone’s postwar governance reform programme has deep roots in the political history of the West that can be traced from Greco-Roman times (Berti 1978) to the Humanist tradition of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.2 However, only after the Second World War were vigorous eff orts made to universalize freedom of expression as seen in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. Although travelling models like freedom of expression, decentralization and gender mainstreaming have proven very useful in the Western contexts from which they ‘travel’, they may not have the desired impacts in sociocultural and political contexts where they are newly arrived (Reyna 2007). Travelling ideas, it has been argued, ‘travel’ across transnational boundaries through a process of translation. Translation implies transformation, not just transfer or movement from one place to another (Rottenburg 2005; see also Rottenburg 2008). In other words, the ‘receiving culture’ is not just a passive recipient of the travelling idea but is actively involved in assessing, modifying, transforming or appropriat- ing the models in line with local realities.

Transnational and Local Actors Transnational and local actors work in partnership to promote the freedom of expression model in postwar Sierra Leone. Th ese include transnational govern- Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 225 mental agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development; United Na- tions family members like the United Nations Development Plan (UNDP) and the United Nations Educational Scientifi c and Cultural Organization; and media foundations like the Th ompson and Ford Foundations. Th ere are also state agencies and a host of international and local NGOs and civil society groups entangled in a complex transnational web. Transnational interventions are clearly evident not only at state level but also locally, as many of Africa’s civil society groups are not purely local or grass-roots organizations, despite often giving that impression. Th ey are mainly international organizations or branches of them, and even where they spring up locally they tend to be organized, funded and guided by the vision of international bodies. Hence, Ferguson (2006) asserts that the state-versus-civil-society analytic framework that is generally taken for granted in the study of African politics turns out to be fl awed when subjected to critical scrutiny. He points out that this analytic framework presents a vertical image or topography of power that is rather simplistic and misleading when viewed against the transnational context within which both the powers at the top (state) and civil society, ideally representing the bottom (local), operate. Englund (2006) makes a similar assertion, maintaining that transnational connections and infl uences, as manifested in (among other things) funding, formulating and implementing human rights and democratization programmes, appear at both state and civil society levels, and that these crucial complex transnational links have to be factored into understanding the dynamics of the African state. Transnational interventions in Africa and the Global South are not driven merely by humanitarian considerations. Th ey are also predicated on the West’s pursuit of strategic self-interest. Hence, international peace-building operations since the end of the Cold War are fi rmly anchored in the idea of the liberal peace. Such peace building in ‘failed’ and collapsed states revolves around a ‘security- development’ nexus born of the view that these states are a threat to international peace in various ways, including their potential to become a breeding ground for terrorists and other extremists who may strike in the West (Duffi eld 2001). Other spin-off s of wars in failed states on countries outside the immediate theatres of armed confl icts, include the proliferation of arms, drug traffi cking, massive and unexpected displacement of people beyond established borders, the outbreak and spread of diseases, disruption of international trade, environmental degradation and more. Any of these could somehow directly or indirectly impact the stability and prosperity of the West. Underdevelopment due to bad governance and the resultant economic downslide, extreme poverty, corruption and weakened social cohesion are held to be the main precursors of these ‘new wars’. It is therefore assumed that development eff ected by neoliberal prescriptions would diff use tensions in these areas and provide the stability that is vital to the continued stability 226 Sylvanus Spencer of the West. Th is brings to mind the Truman Doctrine, which in the interest of the United States and its World War II allies sought to contain the spread of communism by using funds to combat the poverty and underdevelopment that apparently create a seedbed for communist extremism (Urwin 1989). Th e strategies that transnational actors employ in partnership with local actors to translate free expression to postwar Sierra Leone include establishment of a supportive legal framework, provision of media support and civic education programmes. However, the realities on the ground pose considerable challenges to the eff ectiveness of these strategies and militate against full achievement of the desired outcomes. In line with the concept of translation, the targeted culture is not just passively accepting the model wholesale but is involved in modifying and adapting the model to suit existing realities. Local translators, who generally have more organic and direct contact with the local communities, are key partners in the translation process. As Lewis and Mosse (2006) point out, they often form a crucial link between local communities and transnational actors from other sociocultural backgrounds (Lewis and Mosse 2006). In this scheme of things, they are positioned to package the model by modifying or adapting it to fi t local logics and local context while also identifying commonalities (Merry 2006). Although human rights are said to be universal, cultural relativism tends to creep into how they are understood, translated and practised in diff erent sociocultural contexts (An-Na’im and Deng 1990). For instance, in traditional settings local translators of the right to freedom of expression tend to remain silent about the model’s potential to undermine and erode long cherished traditions and to bring about unwelcome shifts in power relations between, for instance, youths and elders or women and men. Furthermore, when it comes to the sensitive issue of secret societies serving as a traditional impedi- ment to free expression, it is generally considered prudent to just gloss over that issue or shelve it until some future date.3

Working for a Supportive Legal Framework Working for a supportive legal framework is a major strategy in translating freedom of expression. Th ose actors who promote this supportive legal framework are guided by the view that freedom of expression is both a political and a legal matter, and that it must be governed and regulated by a conducive legal framework in order to be fully enjoyed and not abused. It is generally assumed that once laws are clearly laid down and penalties for infringement spelled out, people who do not want to be culpable are likely to observe them.4 Yet a closer look at the realities on the ground shows that this is simply not the case. Transnational organizations like the Westminster Foundation for Democ- racy, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) are involved in promoting a revisitation of the existing laws Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 227 guaranteeing and regulating free expression in Sierra Leone. Th eir aim in doing so is to determine how supportive of this right these laws are and how far they accord with modern democratic standards and trends. To this end they have supported advocacy movements for the review of such laws and even provided them with technical and ﬁ nancial assistance. It is hoped that the reviews will result in enactment of new laws like the freedom of information law that is being strongly advocated. Some Sierra Leoneans have expressed hope that with transnational support, laws enacted as far back as the colonial period that do not fulﬁ l the requirements of a democratic postcolonial society will be expunged from the law books. Furthermore, legal reforms assisted by transnational bodies are expected to lead to a harmonizing of the contradictions and ambiguities that currently tend to serve as legal cover, allowing violations to take place with impunity. Th e most unpopular legal restriction on freedom of expression in Sierra Le- one, which has been repeatedly attacked with the help of transnational support, is part 5 of the 1965 Public Order Act, which criminalizes defamatory and seditious libel. Th e Public Order Act stems from the colonial period, when it was used to silence leaders of the nationalist struggle. In the post-independence period it has been used to gag opposition and critics, serving as a trap that has landed many journalists in jail. Th e Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Sierra Le- one) – a transnational brainchild set up with transnational funds – states in its report that this law is a relic of the colonial period. Th e commission considers it outmoded and strongly recommends that it be expunged from the nation’s law books (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone 2004: 131–32). But despite many public pronouncements in favour of this measure, there has been considerable reluctance to make it a reality – apparently due to apprehension that decriminalizing libel would give citizens a stronger voice to fearlessly scrutinize politicians and hold them accountable, something long absent in the political culture of Sierra Leone. Section 32(2) of the Public Order Act states:

Any person who publishes any false statement, rumour or report which is calculated to bring into disrepute any person who holds offi ce under the constitution in the discharge of his duties shall be guilty of an off ence and liable on conviction to a fi ne not exceeding fi ve hundred Leones or to imprisonment not exceeding two years or both.

Section 33 states that a person who, among other things, utters a seditious statement or ‘prints, publicizes, sells, off ers for sale, distributes or reproduces any seditious publication’ shall be guilty of seditious libel and will be imprisoned for up to three years for a fi rst off ence and up to seven years in the case of subsequent off ences. Subsection 2 makes it a crime to be in possession of a story or article declared to be seditious. 228 Sylvanus Spencer

Transnational translators of the free expression model insist that by modern standards, these provisions of the Public Order Act are draconian in that they impose lengthy imprisonment on oﬀ enders just for, among other things, expressing their political views. Th ey maintain that statements critical of governments are necessary and vital to keep them in check. Many local civil society groups caught up in the complex web of transnationalism – especially media practitioners and human rights activists – have expressed the opinion that this law is contrary to the spirit of democracy and militates against development and the consolidation of the nation’s hard-won peace.5

Th e Sierra Leone Association of Journalists and the 1965 Public Order Act With transnational support, the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) has been one of the most active agitators for the repeal of the 1965 Public Order Act, which has been called a ‘killer bill’. Th is is understandable because media practitioners, more than any other category of citizen, have fallen victim to this law. It is therefore unsurprising that when the Law Reform Commission was set up (with international but mainly British support) to review the nation’s laws, SLAJ was one of the earliest to appeal to it for a review of this law. When a new government was elected in 2007, hopes ran high that the ill- famed act would at last be nullifi ed because the new president had been an ardent critic of it while in the opposition. In fact, the ruling All Peoples’ Congress Party had, in its manifesto for the 2007 elections, pledged to review the Public Order Act and ‘improve public trust, confi dence and interest through information sharing’ by removing ‘bottle necks and obstacles that stifl e this free fl ow [of information]’(All Peoples Congress Party 2007).6 Th e spirit of optimism for a free press was also felt by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which welcomed the president’s declared commitment to abrogate the criminal libel law of 1965.7 Under the previous government, headed by President Tejan Kabbah, WAN – in collaboration with the International Press Institute, another transnational organization – had written an open letter to the then president, fruitlessly calling upon him to repeal the nation’s libel law.8 When it became clear that the new government (in spite of many public pronouncements and commitments) was dragging its feet over the hoped-for repeal of the law, the SLAJ’s Bo Convention (of 2008) resolved to seek legal re- dress. Th us SLAJ, with support from OSJI, the Society for Democratic Initiatives (Sierra Leone) and the Media Foundation for West Africa, fi led a lawsuit on 25 February 2008 challenging the constitutional validity of part 5 of the Public Or- der Act of 1965, which, the plaintiff s claimed, directly contravened the guarantee of freedom of expression enshrined in the third chapter of the 1991 Constitution Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 229 of Sierra Leone. Th is lawsuit has the distinction of being the fi rst direct legal challenge to criminal libel law in the region.9 It took the Supreme Court well over six months to issue a ruling on the matter, contrary to the constitutional provision, in Section 120 (16), that it should deliver its decision on matters brought before it not later than three months after the conclusion of the evidence and fi nal arguments. As media practitioners and some members of the public grew impatient with what they considered the judiciary’s sluggish response, journalists registered their impatience by imposing a news blackout on the judiciary and later staged a peaceful protest in front of the offi ce of the ombudsman. Th e situation played into the hands of politicians, who excused themselves from addressing the matter by saying it was already in the hands of the judiciary, whose decision they were not supposed to infl uence. Th e long-awaited verdict held that the criminal libel laws contained in the Public Order Act did not contravene the provisions for freedom of expression contained in the 1991 Constitution, because the Constitution also makes provision for the right to be legally restricted, as seen in Section 25 (2).

Contextual Challenges Promotion of freedom of expression through advocacy for appropriate legal and policy frameworks rests on the assumption that once these laws are in place, stakeholders will have no choice but to abide by them, if they do not wish to be culpable. However, experience has shown that even when these laws are in place, the lack of political will to let them serve their purpose often fosters crafty and ingenious manipulations by state and even nonstate actors. Th is tends to defeat the purposes of such laws. Writing about Africa’s media in this connection, Nyamnjoh (2005) observes:

One of the greatest threats to media freedom in Africa has been the reluctance on the part of government to liberalize press laws. Even where there was such liberalization in principle, governments tended to introduce, by underhand or round about ways, measures and practices that eﬀ ectively curtail press freedom.

Th is is often the case when the judiciary, which is supposed to blow the whistle and impose penalties when there is a breach of the law, has compromised its integrity and therefore lost credibility. Hence, in spite of all the clarion calls for repeal of the nation’s criminal libel laws, only recently did the Sierra Leone Bar Association produce a statement calling on the government to speedily repeal such laws and enact a freedom of information law. Th e ongoing judicial reforms, designed to put in place an uncompromised, independent, properly equipped 230 Sylvanus Spencer and adequately staff ed judiciary, could be considered a crucial part of the entire postwar democratization process in Sierra Leone. Th inking along similar lines led the commissioners of Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to observe that ‘in a true democracy there is no compromise on the supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law’ (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone 2004: 140). A major weakness of eff orts to reform media and free expression laws in this country is that translators have generally not taken into consideration the dual legal system: so far, the focus has been on only the formal legal system. Th is is not surprising, as the formal system is what the foreign translators of the free expression model most easily relate to. Meanwhile, their local partners are reluctant to vigorously confront certain long-cherished, sensitive traditions lest the eff ort provoke outright rejection of the model. However, it is vital to factor the traditional legal system into legal reforms that favour freedom of expression if this fundamental human right is to become truly national and universal. Th e traditional legal system is rooted in the customs and traditions of ethnic communities in the former Protectorate. Th e judicial structure of Sierra Leone gives the Native Administration Courts of the traditional legal system jurisdiction over certain matters, beyond which disputes should in principle be sent to the formal courts. Th e Native Administration Courts dispense justice in line with customary laws that are largely unwritten and thus leave ample room for abuse. Certain restrictions and expectations of this system are not friendly to free expression. For instance, women and youths are deprived of a strong, direct voice in political decisions that aff ect them. Th e system also favours a culture of secrecy that denies access to information to nonmembers of the secret societies that pre- side over the making of certain decisions in some traditional settings. Th us, despite the dreams and ongoing eff orts to harmonize the formal and traditional legal systems in Sierra Leone, the task has proven overwhelming and the dream is far from being realized in the face of enormous social and even political implications.

Providing Media Support Some transnational organizations, such as the U.S.-based Search for Common Ground and the British Broadcasting Corporation World Service Trust, have pursued a strategy of providing media support as a way of promoting freedom of expression. Interviews with some of these organizations reveal that they are mainly driven by the conviction that an irresponsible and unprofessional media is worse than an autocratic regime because irresponsible media practices tend to help justify the autocratic dislike of free expression. Th ese groups operate under the rationale that proper training leads not just to technical knowhow but also to professionalism, dedication, discipline and responsibility. Th erefore, providing Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 231 training for media practitioners is an important component of media support. Media training is expected to nurture the media as a powerful instrument of free expression and curb reckless media practices. Media support also extends to funding media organizations. Some of these have been established by local initiatives but remain very much dependent on transnational support to meet their running costs and fulﬁ l their agendas. Trans- national support for media organizations often reﬂ ects the conviction that a free media plays an important part in promoting development and democratic good governance. For this to be done meaningfully and responsibly while also overcoming attempts to suppress and manipulate press freedom, so the logic goes, media practitioners need to protect themselves and the integrity of their profession through vibrant organizations. It is hoped that unifying individuals and groups will help promote professionalism, facilitate networking with media organizations within and outside the country (e.g. the Committee for the Pro- tection of Journalists, which works to protect press freedom worldwide) and assist in building a united front with journalists, speaking with one voice in advocacy campaigns and in alerts raised about media violations. Th is is important because African media tend to be divided along ethnic and partisan lines. Hence, SLAJ has the stated objective ‘To unite the family of journalists to have one voice’.10

Impact and Contextual Challenges Despite huge transnational support for media organizations, the increasing number of training opportunities available and the corresponding increase in the number of people taking advantage of them, the general opinion is that these factors have not had signifi cant impact on the press in terms of the quality of media coverage among other things. Th e training workshops and seminars are too brief for any eff ective training to take place. To somehow transcend this limitation, the Canada-based Journalists for Human Rights has a team of resident trainers attached to some media outlets in Sierra Leone, where they work alongside local journalists and hold regular monthly workshops. Some media practitioners have often complained that the foreign trainers in particular tend to off er them only rudimentary materials that are not new to them, or not relevant to their professional needs. Some are drawn to these training workshops not by the prospect of improving themselves professionally but by fi nancial incentives for attending, which they consider a supplement to their low income.11 Indeed, the president of SLAJ, in presenting his election manifesto (2008), promised to compile a media training blueprint based on the felt needs of the nation’s media, so that ‘whichever international organization wants to organize a training program in the country will have to choose from our felt needs and not their self-imposed courses’.12 232 Sylvanus Spencer

Media trainers from outside Sierra Leone are usually unfamiliar with some of the peculiar constraints on the press in the country, so the training they off er tends not to refl ect the contextual realities (Carothers 1999: 242). For instance, in an eff ort to show what a badly written story is, a trainer from the United States fi shed one out of a local newspaper and specifi cally pointed out that it was one- sided. Th en, however, the writer of the story explained that in the absence of a freedom of information act, it was diffi cult to get other views; he had hoped that publishing a one-sided story ‘may smoke out’ other sides of it.13 Th e bottom line is that although training may be guided by very laudable intentions, to be meaningful it has to take into consideration local challenges aff ecting the media and freedom of expression in general. Th ese include not only the absence of a freedom of information law, which favours rumour-mongering and impedes investigative journalism, but also high levels of illiteracy and poverty and a frag- mented, politicized media open to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians. Th e focus on training journalists as a way of improving professionalism is based on the assumption that those trained will continue to stay on the job. But indications are that staff retention is poor because low remuneration forces journalists to migrate to better paid jobs. Th is creates a vicious cycle in which there is always a need for trained journalists who, after training (especially young ones), are likely to move on to greener pastures. In this connection, the head of the Mass Communications Unit at Fourah Bay College (University of Sierra Leone) once lamented the problem of retaining journalists trained in the media profession by his unit, saying that their attraction to better paid jobs had kept them from making a positive impact on the media.14 Media support directed at getting the media to develop a corporate identity, pull their resources together and speak with one voice on issues that aff ect them has not yielded the desired result. Th is is owed in part to a failure to steer away from ethnic sentiments and political leanings, as the media in Sierra Leone – as in many other African countries – are torn by partisan and tribal strife, and media practitioners, despite much rhetoric, have allowed these narrow and selfi sh considerations to override professional ethics and national interests. In a speech marking the thirty-eighth anniversary of the founding of SLAJ, the association’s president, referring to undiminished infi ghting and disunity within the media, lamented that the nation’s media could become the cause of the next civil disturbance in the country if practitioners do not behave responsibly and put national interest above all else.

Undertaking Civic Education Providing civic education with the aim of transmitting democratic knowledge and values, fostering democratic practices and encouraging civic engagement is another strategy employed in translating freedom of expression. Civic education may be defi ned as a form of education that, by itself or as part of a broader system Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 233 of education, is designed to formally or informally transmit knowledge, skills and values that are associated with responsible citizenship. Its fundamental aim is to equip and motivate citizens to eff ectively participate in governance and activities that aff ect the well-being of the public (Finkel 2003: 4–5). In Sierra Leone, several governmental and nongovernmental agencies, politicians, educational institutions and civil society groups, among others, have engaged in providing some form of civic education for the building of a democratic culture. However, few of these civic education providers focus explicitly on promoting the right to freedom of expression in their programmes. Understandably, the media and some human rights groups devote more attention to promoting the right to freedom of expression. In translating the model of the right to freedom of expression, civic educa- tors with some training and initiative often seek to draw parallels with aspects of the local way of life that in some ways support the value of free expression. Th ese translators of the model often attempt to make their presentations lively, meaningful and acceptable in local contexts by drawing on local aphorisms, par- ables, folklore, symbols and the like that in some way portray the value of airing one’s views. For example, in teaching the importance of the right to freedom of expression during a civic education outreach programme at Waterloo Village on the outskirts of Freetown, members of the civic group Adventist Youths Organi- zation sought to drive home their message by linking it with popular local sayings such as ‘God has given us mouths so that we can speak out our minds’ and ‘Your grievances are only known when you reveal them’. In the same vein, ‘fambul tok’ – a local concept that could be translated as ‘frank family discussions’ – is used by Fambul Tok International (a ‘local’ NGO) to convey the importance of candid, open expressions of interests and grievances among community members. Th e ‘fambul tok’ concept is based on the notion that in an ideal family, members are at liberty to freely express the depth their minds, knowing full well that the grievances or concerns will be heard regardless of their nature, and that generally all eff orts will be made to amicably address these issues with the interest of the family in mind. Like other translators of Western models of confl ict management and good governance, Fambul Tok In- ternational draws on some locally cherished social values and symbols as a strategy for translating freedom of expression. Th e strategy of linking the model with local symbols and drawing on cultural frames of reference in order to induce acceptance is also evident in the media and civic education programmes of the U.S.-based NGO Search for Common Ground, whose mission statement says:

We work with local partners to fi nd culturally appropriate means to strengthen societies’ capacity to deal with confl ict constructively; to understand the diff erences and act on the commonalities.15 234 Sylvanus Spencer

Search for Common Ground engages in (among other things) the training of media practitioners and produces good governance and civic education radio programmes through its Talking Drum Studios. Th e name ‘Talking Drum’ is a cultural reference point and a cultural link to the notion of free expression. It refers to a common West African musical instrument that is used not only for entertainment purposes but also to summon people to a gathering for discussion or call a meeting to attention. Meaningful civic education requires more than just acquiring knowledge about freedom of expression and other human rights and being able to discuss the issues surrounding them. Apart from transmitting knowledge (which unfortunately tends to be the emphasis in most cases) there is also a need to get citizens to internalize the civic value of free expression and reﬂ ect it in their attitudes and behaviours. Th is demands systematic, sustained sessions rather than mere sporadic sessions devoted to mainly transmitting knowledge. Whereas knowledge may be acquired in several classroom sessions or community meetings, internal- ization of values leading to a desired change in attitude and behaviour tends to be much more gradual. Th is is especially so when certain aspects of the political culture are at variance with the desired civic education goals. Th us eﬀ ective civic education is not just delivered through lessons taught but also involves a complex web of corporation and reinforcement from interdependent social institutions like the home, social groups and the wider community, which are also engaged in the process of political socialization (Stroupe and Sabato 2004).

Impact and Contextual Challenges Th at transmitting civic knowledge alone is not enough to promote freedom of expression is evident from the fact that even some highly educated citizens are at times hesitant to freely exercise their rights. Th is is very much so when it comes to exercising the right to free expression by speaking a contrary view or taking the opposite side on certain issues. Th is tendency could be partly attributed to the prevalence of a patronage system in which people at times seek to elicit a patron’s protection and support by turning a blind eye and keeping quiet about certain issues bordering on that patron’s integrity. Apart from this political hypocrisy, there are also times when even highly educated people have been socially conditioned by a general culture of silence and what Ibelema (2008) calls ‘civic cynicism’, that is, the pessimistic conviction that the situation is so bad it cannot be remedied, no matter how much one speaks out against it. Th e high level of intolerance of opposing views manifested by students, especially in student union elections at tertiary institutions, also underscores the observation that acquisition of knowledge alone does not guarantee that citizens will claim and freely exercise their right to free expression (or other rights). Free- dom of expression involves more than making one’s own views known – rec- Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 235 ognition of the other sides’ right to make their views known in matters both political and nonpolitical. With regards to expressing political views, high levels of intolerance have been manifest at educational institutions where, for instance, students from rival student union political camps have violently persecuted their colleagues for holding diff erent views. Th is occurred during the 2008 student union elections at the Freetown Teachers College when one camp of students presented its election manifesto and then violently prevented members of the other camp from presenting theirs. In recent times the university campuses of Fourah Bay College (FBC) and Njala University have witnessed violent confrontations between student political camps that resulted in temporary bans of student union bodies. In fact, just under two years after the ban was lifted on student union politics at FBC, electoral violence erupted again between the ‘Black Camp’ and the ‘White Camp’, which are said to be receiving support from the two leading political parties in the country. As the fever of the 2010 FBC student union election ran high, the Peace Society, Students for Democracy, and the Media and Public Relations Depart- ment of the Sierra Leone Police, among others, took pre-emptive measures to forestall violence. Yet in spite of intervention by campus- and noncampus-based human rights and peace organizations preaching the values of free expression and political tolerance, violent outbursts resulted in wounding with intent and destruction of property. Th is ugly development at FBC was worrisome to most observers not only because the students, as future leaders, are expected to set an example of tolerating divergent political views, but also because student politics at FBC in the 1980s somehow became a seedbed that sprouted the revolutionary fervour that culminated in the decade-long civil war (Abdullah 2004: Chaps. 2 and 3). In assessing the use of civic education to promote freedom of expression and other rights, one has to examine whether the knowledge, skills and values transmitted have brought about the intended attitudinal and behavioural change manifested in a political orientation towards good citizenship and meaningful participation in governance. Compared with what obtained in the prewar period, many more citizens across the country do have some knowledge about the right to freedom of expression and know they are entitled to enjoy it. However, a large percentage of the population of Sierra Leone have not demonstrated that they know how to exercise this right within the confi nes of the law. Apparently they have not fully realized and appreciated that there are very good reasons to do so. Th is should not be attributed only to failure to strike a balance between ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ or, in some cases, to initiate and sustain well-thought-out civic education programmes. It is also due to the fact that bringing about attitudinal and behavioural change is a gradual process – especially in postwar settings like Sierra Leone, where the political culture has long been marked by exclusiveness 236 Sylvanus Spencer and intolerance that can be traced far back to the early years of the post-independence period. Th e high level of illiteracy and lack of formal education do not help the situation. As the UNDP points out in its Practical Guidance Note on civic education, ‘literacy levels are fundamental in civic education programming and can be a signifi cant barrier if not addressed appropriately’ (United Nations Development Plan 2004: 27). Illiteracy means that the educational information transmitted cannot be reinforced by the printed word; nor can the learning experience be sustained and exchanged by that means. Furthermore, the lack of formal education may aff ect citizens’ capacity to appreciate abstract concepts and fully analyse and evaluate what is being conveyed. Th is is why the Sierra Leone Adult Education Association, in addition to its commitment to promote peace building and human rights among adults, is also engaged in supporting programmes to reduce the high rate of illiteracy among them. A major weakness in translating freedom of expression through civic education is the apparent over-emphasis on political and civil rights (i.e. the category of rights to which freedom of expression belongs) at the expense of economic, social and cultural rights. Englund (2006) describes how both political elites and civil society groups tend to fall short in this respect in their promotion of human rights in Malawi. While not subscribing to the view that there is a hierarchy of rights, Englund asserts that political rights tend to be very abstract to the ordinary man, and that dwelling simply on them diverts attention from real bread-and-butter issues like health, employment and education, which are enshrined in economic, social and cultural rights and tend to have more immediate relevance to the needs and conditions of the masses. Englund maintains that this imbalance, evidenced by both political elites and civil society with support from transnational bodies, deprives the citizenry of the substantive meaning of democracy. Still, this need not be the case if human rights are presented as indivisible or mutually supportive. Although freedom of expression belongs to the category of civil and political rights and may be regarded as a primary right, it is more meaningfully promoted by positioning it alongside economic, social and cultural rights rather than solely with other civil and political rights. Th e right to freedom of expression is related to economic, social and cultural rights and can in many ways contribute to real socioeconomic and cultural gains. For instance, deprived communities have to be able to freely and openly voice their felt needs to engage the attention of government and attract an appropriate response. Also, for the development process to be meaningful to citizens, and for them to have a vested interest in the process, they are expected to participate in various ways, including by expressing their views on development policies and programmes. Th e vertical and horizontal fl ow of information may provide feedback helpful in managing confl ict and building Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 237 the peaceful environment that is often conducive to economic development and social well-being.

Conclusion Despite many challenges, transnational interventions in translating the model of freedom of expression in postwar Sierra Leone have contributed to a gradual expansion of political space for increased participation in governance (although in some cases this participation is manipulated, as when people are, contrary to their political convictions, fi nancially seduced into putting up a show of support by masquerading in political party colours). Th e expanding space for free expression and participation in governance is evident in a growing media pluralism and the mushrooming of civil society groups (some of which have questionable credentials, however). Also increasing is the use of pop music, especially by young people, to express political views critical of their governments. Th rough the disparaging lyrics of pop songs like ‘Mr Government’ and ‘Positive Change’, Sierra Leonean youth have become very vocal about issues like mismanagement, corruption and tribalism. Th is unprecedented development is a far cry from what obtained in the past, when singing of such songs was enough to land one behind bars and discussing such issues was an off ence known as ‘careless talk’. Although the freedom of expression model has the potential to fulfi l the desired outcomes of managing confl icts and encouraging participation in governance, at times it inadvertently generates new confl icts associated with what some politicians view as irresponsible exercise of this freedom. Some concerned citizens have also bemoaned what they perceive as unhealthy rivalry among highly politicized media groups as a new source of confl ict. Elderly citizens in particular have lamented the use of what they consider to be vulgar and inciting lyrics by allegedly contracted musicians. For instance, two of the songs of Sierra Leonean musician Innocent – ‘Bailiff ’ and ‘Ejectment [Eviction] Notice’ – convey the idea of forceful removal of the ruling government. In the latter song, which mentions unpopular politicians who insist on perpetuating their hold on power at all costs, he sings of stabbing them in the stomach. Similarly, the musician Emerson Bockarie, in his popular ‘Borboh Belleh’ (Boy with Bloated Stomach) maintains that it is right to beat up a thief (which in this context refers to a corrupt politician) until he loses a tooth. Th is use of violent lyrics cannot be ascribed solely to the horrifying violence experienced during the country’s recent civil war. Also pertinent is that most of these artists are inspired by American hip-hop musicians who, in exercising their right to free expression as provided for in the First Amendment of the American Constitution, have become notorious for their use of vulgar lyrics and glorifi cation of violence. 238 Sylvanus Spencer

Th e translation approach off ers a realistic expectation that the free expression model will not be wholly passively accepted by the culture into which it is being translated. It implies sensitivity to cultural and contextual diff erences, which may be taken on board in the process of translation. Translators should not be surprised or discouraged by unintended outcomes or achievements that only marginally refl ect what obtains back home in the West.

Sylvanus Spencer is a senior lecturer and the head of the Department of His- tory and African Studies at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, University of Sierra Leone. His recent publications include ‘Singing for Change: Music as a Means of Political Expression for Young People in Sierra Leone and Liberia’ in Traveling Models in African Conﬂ ict Management: Translating Technologies of Social Ordering (Brill, 2014) and ‘Th e Use of Pop Songs by Sierra Leonean Youths in Enjoying the Space Created for Freedom of Expression after the Civil War’, Africa Today 59(1) (2012).

Notes 1. Interview: Henry Lebbie, ex-combatant of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), 19 February 1997. 2. Th e Renaissance and Enlightenment were intellectual movements in Europe that stressed, among other things, the need for free expression and tolerance. 3. Interview: A.G. Sesay, Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, 17 August 2010. 4. Interviews: James Wolo, Head of Media Monitoring and Development (United Nations Mission in Liberia), 19 March 2008; J.C. Humper, Chairman Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, 28 May 2007. 5. Interview: Ronald Gidwani, President of Human Rights Clinic, Fourah Bay College, 7 May 2007. 6. All Peoples Congress Party Manifesto for the 2007 Elections, retrieved 19 October 2015 from http://www.sierraherald.com/apc-manifesto.htm. 7. See Newsletter of the World Association of Newspapers, no. 38, April 2008. 8. ‘Sierra Leone: Open Letter to President on Libel Laws’. Retrieved 9 November 2009 from http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/media/28778. 9. ‘Lawsuit Seeks Greater Freedom of Expression in Sierra Leone’. Retrieved 20 March 2008 from http://www.justiveinitiative.org/db/resource2?res_id=104048. 10. See the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists website: http://slajsl.com// (retrieved 22 November 2008). 11. Interview: Mathew Qwerty, journalist, Radio Democracy, 7 May 2006. 12. Manifesto of Umaru Fofanah for the 2008 SLAJ presidential election. Retrieved from SLAJ Head Oﬃ ce, Campbell Street, Freetown. 13. Interview: Alpha Rashid Jalloh, media practitioner, Independent Newspaper, 11 May 2008. 14. Statement of Isaac Massaquoi, head of the Mass Communications Unit, Fourah Bay Col- lege Faculty of Arts Board Meeting, 13 May 2009. 15. See the Search for Common Ground website: http: //www.sfcg.org/sfcg/sfcg_home.html (retrieved 5 April 2008). Expanding Space for Free Expression in Sierra Leone 239

References Abdullah, I. 2004. ‘Bush Path to Destruction: Th e Origin and Character of the RUF/SL’, in I. Abdullah (ed.), Between Democracy and Terror: Th e Sierra Leone Civil War. Dakar: CODESRIA, pp. 41–65. Abraham, A. 2000. ‘Liberia and Sierra Leone: History of Misery and Misery of History’, Inter- national Journal of Sierra Leone Studies and Reviews 1(1): 5–32. An-Na’im, A.A., and F.M. Deng (eds). 1990. Human Rights in Africa: Cross Cultural Perspec- tives. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Ayissi, A., and P. Robin-Edward (eds). 2000. Bound to Cooperate: Confl ict, Peace and People in Sierra Leone. Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. Berti, E. 1978. ‘Ancient Greek Dialectic as Freedom of Th ought and Speech’, Journal of the History of Ideas 39(3): 349–75. Boas, M. 2001. ‘Liberia and Sierra Leone – Dead Ringers? Th e Logic of Neo-patrimonial Rule’, Th ird World Quarterly 22(5): 697–723. Carothers, T. 1999. Aiding Democracy Abroad: Th e Learning Curve. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment. Collier, P., and A. Hoeffl er. 2003. ‘Greed and Grievances in Civil Wars’, Oxford Economic Papers 56(4): 536–95. Duffi eld, M. 2001. Global Governance and the New Wars: Th e Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Books. Englund, H. 2006. Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. London: Univer- sity of California Press. Ferguson, J. 2006. ‘Transnational Topographies of Power: Beyond “the State” and “Civil So- ciety” in the Study of African Politics’, in B. Maurer and G. Schwab (eds), Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 76–98. Finkel, S.E. 2003. Can Democracy Be Taught? Civil Society and the Development of a Democratic Political Culture. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Francis, D.J. 2006. Uniting Africa: Building Regional Peace and Security Systems. Surrey: Ashgate. Hirsh, J.L. 2001. Sierra Leone Diamonds and the Struggle for Democracy. London: Lynne Rienner. Hoff man, D. 2007. ‘Disagreement, Dissent Politics and the War in Sierra Leone’, Africa Today. Retrieved 6 July 2007 from Project Muse http//muse.jhu.ed. Ibelema, M. 2008. Th e African Press, Civic Cynicism and Democracy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaplan, R. 1994. ‘Th e Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of our Planet’, Th e Atlantic Monthly 273(2): 44–76. Lewis, D., and D. Mosse (eds). 2006. Development Brokers and Translators: Th e Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. Bloomfi eld, CT: Kumarian Press. Merry, S.E. 2006. ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’, American Anthropologist 108(1): 38–51. Milliken, J. (ed.). 2003. State Failure, Collapse and Reconstruction. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons. Neumayer, E. 2003. Pattern of Aid Giving: Th e Impact of Good Governance on Development Assistance. London: Routledge. Nyamnjoh, F.B. 2005. Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging. New York: Zed Books. 240 Sylvanus Spencer

Peters, K. 2010. ‘Generating Rebels and Soldiers: On the Socio-economic Crisis of Rural Youth in Sierra Leone Before the War’, in J. Knörr and W. Trajano Filho (eds), Th e Pow- erful Presence of the Past: Integration and Confl ict along the Upper Guinea Coast. Leiden: Brill, pp. 323–55. Reyna, S.P. 2007. ‘Th e Traveling Model Th at Would Not Travel: Oil, Empire and Patrimonial- ism in Contemporary Chad’, Social Analysis 51(3): 78–102. Richards, P. 1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: Heinemann. ———. 2005. ‘To Fight or to Farm? Agrarian Dimensions of the Mano River Confl icts (Li- beria and Sierra Leone)’, African Aff airs 104(417): 571–90. Rottenburg, R. 2005. ‘Code Switching or Why a Metacode Is Good to Have’, in B. Car- niawska and G. Sevon (eds), Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects and Practices Travel in the Global Economy. Malmö: Författarna och Liber AB, pp. 259–74. ———. 2008. ‘From Transfer to Translation’. Keynote lecture delivered at the Summer School on Cultural Translation held at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, 13 July. Stroupe K.S., and L.J. Sabato. 2004. ‘Politics: Th e Missing Link of Responsible Civic Educa- tion’, CIRCLE Working Paper no. 18. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Centre for Politics. http://www.civicyouth.org/PopUps/WorkingPapers/WP18Stroupe.pdf. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone. 2004. Report of the Truth and Reconcil- iation Commission of Sierra Leone, vol. 4. Accra: Graphic Packaging Ltd. United Nations Development Plan. 2004. Practical Guidance Note on Civic Education. New York: UNDP. Urwin, D.W. 1989. Western Europe Since 1945: A Political History, 4th edn. London: Longman. Chapter 12 Sierra Leone, Child Soldiers and Global Flows of Child Protection Expertise Susan Shepler

In the fi eld of international struggles for the protection of children aff ected by war, there are many ‘fi rsts’ in the case of Sierra Leone. Th e peace accord signed in Lomé in 1999 was the fi rst African peace accord to specifi cally mention the reintegration of former child soldiers. Th e United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone was the fi rst UN peacekeeping mission to include a child protection offi cer. Th e Special Court for Sierra Leone was the fi rst international criminal tribunal to convict individuals of war crimes for conscripting and enlisting children.1 Since then, the fi eld of child protection for children aff ected by war has only expanded. Disarmament, demobilization and rehabilitation programmes for children are now standard practice in nations where child soldiers exist. In 2006, Th omas Lubanga of the DRC became the fi rst person ever arrested under a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of fi fteen years and using them to participate actively in hostilities. Across the world, there are currently over sixty child protection advisers in seven UN peacekeeping missions and in two UN political missions, and there is a move to include child protection offi cers in all peacekeeping missions.2 Th e UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Confl ict notes that

mainstreaming the issue of children and armed conﬂ ict in United Na- tions system-wide activities and within United Nations entities is a central strategy to ensure the practical application of standards and norms for the protection of children. Signiﬁ cant progress has been made, particularly in the peace and security sector. Th e General Assembly and the Security Council have led the way in enabling more concerted action 242 Susan Shepler

by the United Nations system as a whole on children aﬀ ected by armed conﬂ ict.3

Furthermore, the UN Security Council has asked regional organizations to include ‘child protection expertise’ in their secretariats and development of child protection action plans. Th is phenomenal growth in the institutional development of child protection for children aff ected by war mirrors the speed with which the international community adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely and quickly adopted human rights convention in history. At the risk of sounding cynical, it seems clear that child protection for children aff ected by war is a growth industry, creating new employment and new expertise around the world. Th e focus of this chapter is these remarkable transnational processes of institu- tionalization and knowledge production. At issue are the following questions: What is child protection expertise? Where does it come from? How is it created? How does it move around the world? I address these questions through an exploration of child protection expertise as it was deployed in Sierra Leone during and after the confl ict there (1991 to 2002). Th e war in Sierra Leone is known in the world for three things (rightly or wrongly): blood diamonds, amputation as a weapon of war and child soldiers. Although children and youth’s participation in violent confl ict is not new (Rosen 2005; Shepler 2010b) the modern phenomenon of ‘child soldier’ is new. My dissertation (Shepler 2005a) was based on eighteen months of ethnographic fi eldwork in interim care centres for demobilized child soldiers and in a number of communities where children were reintegrating. In it I described how the process of child soldiers’ reintegration drew on two diff erent models of childhood: the Western, represented by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; and the Sierra Leonean, represented by traditions of child labour, fosterage, and training. My work focuses on the conjuncture of the global and the local models of childhood, describing how in practice child soldiers are made at the intersection of the two. Between these two models there are clear power diff erences, the West- ern model better funded and based on child protection expertise. Despite the obvious power asymmetry, however, I do not regard this encounter as merely an imposition. Indeed, I found the intersection of the two models to be a productive site for all concerned, with some Sierra Leoneans strategically using child rights discourse for their own ends and international child rights practitioners honing their models for export to other postconfl ict contexts. Child rights discourse and child protection practice did ease the reintegration of some children and youth while also benefi ting some local NGOs and development workers. But it also had broader political eff ects in Sierra Leone, aff ecting what Sharon Stephens (1995) calls ‘the cultural politics of childhood’ and creating new subjectivities, especially for children and youth. Child Soldiers and Global Flows of Expertise 243

Contending Models of Human Rights Let us take a step back and discuss some of the contending models of how ‘universal’ discourses such as child rights interact with particular local contexts. Mark Goodale, in his introduction to the volume Th e Practice of Human Rights: Track- ing Law Between the Global and the Local, notes that

diﬀ erent orientations to the problem of human rights as a normative category can be usefully placed on a spectrum of degrees of expansive- ness. At one end of the spectrum … are the diﬀ erent variations of the view that ‘human rights’ refers to the body of international law… A somewhat more expansive orientation … consider[s] the ways in which the concept of human rights … is itself normative. [T]he other end of the spectrum … treat(s) human rights as one among several consequential transnational discourses. (2007: 6–8)

Goodale calls this last the discursive approach to human rights and argues that to conceptualize human rights as one among several key transnational discourses is to elevate social practice as both an analytical and methodological category. ‘Discursive approaches to human rights assume that social practice is, in part, constitutive of the idea of human rights itself’ (Goodale 2007: 8). Th e discursive approach, with its focus on the importance of social practice, is much more satisfying to an anthropologist than a theory of simple norm diﬀ u- sion that is totally top down and does not consider power in the analysis. It takes seriously the actions of the people on the ground who are the supposed targets of rights-based interventions. A social practice approach is also more satisfying than a theory of imposition that sees any kind of universal rights discourse as an imperialism of the West, ignoring the contributions of Africans themselves. See- ing rights discourse and practice as a form of neocolonialism or governmentality is also top-down but has the opposite problem of an exclusive focus on power. Sally Engle Merry ﬁ nds a happy medium by exploring ‘the practice of human rights, focusing on where and how human rights concepts and institutions are produced, how they circulate, and how they shape everyday lives and actions’ (Merry 2006b: 39). Her approach is built on the concept of individual translators, or intermediaries:4

Intermediaries play a critical role in translating human rights concepts to make them relevant to local situations. Th ese ideas become localized through the work of individuals who serve as translators between transnational and local arenas. Th ey are people who hold a double consciousness, combining both human rights conceptions and local ways of thinking about grievances. Th ey move between them, translating local 244 Susan Shepler

problems into human rights terms and human rights concepts into approaches to local problems. … On the one hand they have to speak the language of international human rights that the international donors prefer in order to get funds. On the other hand, they have to present their initiatives in cultural terms that will be acceptable to at least some of the local community. As they scramble for funds, they often need to select issues that the international donors are interested in, such as female genital cutting, women’s empowerment, or traﬃ cking, even though local populations may be more interested in clean drinking water, changed inheritance laws, or good roads (Merry 2006a: 229).

Merry’s model, then, is that ﬁ rst human rights are localized through the work of good local translators, and then ideas about discourse and practice move around transnational networks. Th ere is much to recommend this approach, but the model is still essentially top-down and maintains a polarization between the global centre and various local peripheries.5 I want to move away from the idea that expertise comes from the top down and is imposed on locals (though that is certainly still the model in many Sierra Leonean villages I worked in). I do not want to lose what is useful about Merry’s work on the vernacularization of rights, but at the end of Merry’s work, one gets the feeling that the local folks, though active translators and hence agentive, cannot leave their locations. Local folks can have local knowledge, which is then taken up and used by the global apparatus. One gets the sense that locals may be moving ideas up hierarchies, especially ideas about how they have cleverly localized rights in their respective contexts, but that as representatives of the local, they have no chance to leave their spot on the ground. Merry admits as much, saying, ‘Localizing human rights does not typically change the meaning and structure of human rights. Th e human rights approach retains its distinctive cultural conception of the person, embedded in the human rights documents, which values autonomy, security of the body, and equality’ (Merry 2006a: 229).

Tentative Steps towards a New Approach My search for another way of understanding what I was seeing in Sierra Leone has led me to expertise.6 In my use of the term, I turn to scientiﬁ c studies as a way of understanding the politics and social organization of the creation of expertise, and of addressing power head on.

What Is Expertise? In a review of expertise for the Annual Reviews of Anthropology, Carr (2010) explains, Child Soldiers and Global Flows of Expertise 245

Expertise is something people do rather than something people have or hold … (it) is inherently interactional because it involves the participation of objects, producers, and consumers of knowledge. … Expertise is always ideological because it is implicated in semistable hierarchies of value that authorize particular ways of seeing and speaking as expert. … Th ese practices are routinized and organized as institutional boundaries are forged between diﬀ erent ways of knowing the very same thing, spawning the social conﬁ gurations we call profession, craft, and discipline. (ibid.: 18)

Th is description resonates with my work on former child soldiers. Ethics for the care of children and models for their reintegration after social crisis already existed in postwar Sierra Leone, but they did not count as expert knowledge. Th ey were local knowledge, or culture. Carr also talks about naming practices that distinguish expert knowledge from everyday knowledge, and again, his description resonates with what happened around child protection and child rights in Sierra Leone. It was not that people did not know how to take care of their children, but that they were exposed to a new expert language to describe it, what I have called ‘the Rites of the Child’ (Shepler 2005b). As Mitchell (2002) argues, the rise of modern Egyptian technopolitical expertise would have been impossible without the fi gure of the Egyptian peasant as nonintellectual Other (cited in Carr 2010: 22). Similarly, child protection experts cannot exist without Africans who do not know how to protect their children. But expertise is about more than creating and maintaining hierarchies. From a more philosophical direction, Harry Collins and Robert Evans’ book Rethink- ing Expertise (2007) presents the ‘Periodic Table of Expertises’ and discusses ubiquitous and specialist expertises, meta-expertises and meta-criteria, ranging from ‘beer mat knowledge’ to technical connoisseurship. It includes experience, track record, certifi cation, etc. Th ey conclude that credentials are not a very useful means of judging expertise and fi nd experience and track record to be better ‘meta-criteria.’

What Is Child Protection Expertise? Almost all child protection actors operate from a ‘rights-based framework’, but child protection expertise includes more than just knowledge of child rights. Child protection in confl ict and postconfl ict settings is certainly also built on some disciplinary foundations: psychology, education, social work and so on. I have argued for the importance of ethnography in understanding the situation of child soldiers in child protection settings, but I am up against scholars such as Th eresa Betancourt, who use psychological testing to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder among former child soldiers (Betancourt et al. 2010). Betancourt’s 246 Susan Shepler work is emblematic of another type of expertise: clinical, for which Sierra Leone is a case of a more generalizable condition. She and her team move from case to case administering psychological protocols and diagnosing pathologies. Th is sort of expertise is undergirded by the medical model and the disciplinary institutions of the academy. Meanwhile, scholar-practitioners like Wessells (2007) and Boothby, Strang and Wessells (2006) apply a less ‘scientifi c’, more practice-based knowledge that grows out of the more practical disciplines of social work and social psychology. However, since child protection in confl ict and postconfl ict contexts is such a new fi eld of endeavour, perhaps only a few decades old, a great deal of the expertise is based on practical experience. In only a limited number of cases has programming even been attempted, and most of the tacit knowledge undergirding child protection expertise is about what has worked and not worked in diff erent places. Th us the building programmes in Sierra Leone ten years ago relied heavily on knowledge of what had been done in Mozambique, Uganda and Liberia (round one interventions). One revealing example is the pressure that came from international child protection NGOs to fi nd (and fund) Sierra Leonean healing rituals in an astound- ing confl ation of all African contexts: since traditional healing rituals existed in Mozambique and Uganda, the NGOs reasoned, they must exist in Sierra Leone. Transnational child protection expertise assumed there would be ‘local’ ways of dealing with war-aff ected children across all African contexts. In the case of Sierra Leone there was no such healing ritual, my informants told me, but savvy local ‘healers’ were able to concoct a ritual that satisfi ed the international staff . Th e really revealing point is that the power asymmetry between the global and local models is so great that child protection expertise is not threatened by the adoption of ‘traditional healing rituals’ – on the contrary, putting the ‘traditional’ in its right place is an important part of its function. Th e logic of transnational child protection expertise undoes ethnographic specifi city, confl ating all ‘local’ settings.

Th ree Groups of People with Child Protection Expertise In an eff ort to think through the various types of child protection expertise present in the case of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, as well as those expertises’ relationship to knowledge and experience, I have come up with a preliminary typology. Th e fi rst type of expertise – that of former child soldiers themselves – comes from personal experience. Certain former child soldiers, like Ishmael Beah (author of best seller A Long Way Gone, 2007, famously sold at Starbucks) and others, possess embodied expertise and have, in some ways, traded it on the child protection lecture circuit. Ishmael Beah became a poster boy for child soldiers as the Sierra Leone war became known for child soldiers, and a great many of the public’s general ideas about what child soldiers need come from that book. Th ey Child Soldiers and Global Flows of Expertise 247 are tokens in a way, but also powerful lobbying tools. I have recently been asked, by organizers of panels at places like the United States Institute of Peace, if I knew any former child soldiers for their panel: ‘A girl, or someone with a disability would be even better!’ Th e commodifi cation of the former child soldier is a clear phenomenon, but it is not exactly what I am talking about.7 Th e second group of people with a claim to child protection expertise are employees of international child protection NGOs. For the most part they are Amer- icans and Europeans, and they generally have the educational certifi cation (though not always). But as I have noted above, child protection expertise is also very practical. It comes from a ‘track record’ of successfully implementing programmes. It operates on the currency of ‘lessons learned’ and ‘best practices’. Th is group of experts has mobile knowledge. Th ey move from context to context and have extensive transnational networks. Th ey have put programmes into practice elsewhere. eyTh showed up in Sierra Leone from postings in Mozambique and Uganda, and went on to postings in Liberia and Sri Lanka. Th eirs is ‘practical’ knowledge. Th e third group of experts, and those I am most interested in, are local NGO workers. Like Merry’s translators, they use their so-called double consciousness to move back and forth between local expertise and, always in opposition to it, transnational expert knowledge. Within the devastated postwar Sierra Leonean economy, they are part of the new middle class, a professional NGO class whose professionalism is made possible only by international funding and transnational networks. Of course there are other levels, including workers at smaller NGOs who try to access knowledge in order to access funds. Coulter (2004) has described these ‘briefcase NGOs’ in Sierra Leone. To the extent that they have managed to learn the language of child protection, representatives of local communities, headmen and schoolmasters also have gained a bit of expertise just by learning how to tell the NGOs and international NGOs (INGOs) what they want to hear. Th at is, they are somewhat less successful translators. Th ey may have participated in a ‘training of trainers.’ Th ey may be able to enumerate the victims in their community. INGOs have ‘empowered’ them, but only to a certain extent. ‘Sensitization’, the ubiquitous tool of norm diff usion, is supposed to spread child rights knowledge but still maintains the boundaries between local knowledge and expert knowledge (Shepler 2005b).

How Does Expertise Work? Expertise involves, among other things, the establishment of asymmetries among people and between people and objects. It creates boundaries between expert and non-expert knowledge (even if they are very close in content). For example, while the war was still ongoing in the late 1990s before international NGOs were seriously active, local NGOs such as Christian Brothers and Children Aﬀ ected by War were doing child protection activities their own way, building on pre- 248 Susan Shepler existing programmes for street kids and orphanages, and often making do with very little by drawing on Sierra Leonean models of child protection like child fosterage. Th ough in many ways they were doing the job in better, more sustainable ways before the international players arrived, they were outspent and out- expertised when actors such as UNICEF, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee arrived. In Sierra Leone, expertise bore a certain international imprimatur. Should we see this state of aﬀ airs as primarily the imposition of the ‘Western’ way of doing things, simply as power? I believe there is more going on.

Individual Career Trajectories and Actor Networks Perhaps I can best illustrate this relationship between local and international expertise with an example. My friend Mohammed8 and my Sierra Leonean husband taught together at the same secondary school in the early 1980s. Mohammed went on to run a local NGO in Sierra Leone for former child soldiers, and was a skilled translator of transnational forms and of local knowledge. He eventually left Sierra Leone to put his child protection expertise to work for UNICEF in Afghanistan (which at the time had great need of staff but little appeal as a destination). After that, he was transferred to several other African postings. What are the components of Mohammed’s child protection expertise? Certainly he learned a lot from his experience in Sierra Leone as the head of a successful child protection NGO, but I believe it was his ability as a translator that made his international career possible. As I said earlier, understandings of local contexts in a handful of national cases form the knowledge base of this relatively new fi eld; therefore being Sierra Leonean is an important part of Moham- med’s expertise. Sierra Leone’s disarmament, demobilization and rehabilitation programmes for children have been deemed successful and are now models for others. Th e structure of child protection expertise enables this by confl ating all local knowledge, as already discussed. Once Mohammed grasped local knowledge in one setting, he could then move seamlessly to another ‘local’ context and in some ways continue to represent ‘the local’ in a diff erent national context. Mohammed can trade on his Sierra Leone experiences, and also his Sierra Leonean-ness, not as a token but as part of what we might call an actor-network (Latour 1987). Understanding his experience allows us to move beyond Merry’s model of locals forever stuck ‘on the ground’ in their own settings. Mohammed was a skilled translator but also a mobile actor, contributing to an evolving body of child protection expertise as he moved.

Conclusion One could argue that this whole chapter is based on the observation that a skilful Sierra Leonean got a job with the UN that he would not have got, had war not Child Soldiers and Global Flows of Expertise 249 come to his country. Th ere are no grand conclusions here; I have only reframed my original questions about what happens at the intersection of global and local models of childhood by shifting my focus to the nature of transnational child protection expertise to ask whether and how local-level expertise can move in that system. What are the conditions in which individual Sierra Leoneans make use of or contribute to that system? How often are Sierra Leoneans able to act in ways other than representing ‘local knowledge’? And how, therefore, does transnational expertise work to replicate existing power relations or create new challenges to existing power relations? One thing is clear: Sierra Leone is the type of ‘case’ of child protection on which expertise is built. Sierra Leone is now a node in child-protection actor networks. Sierra Leone, as a laboratory of the most traumatized kids, has a new kind of capital. Th e dance therapy practitioner goes there to work with a set of war-traumatized youth. Th e psychological tests woman goes there to design and test her trauma protocols. Th e participatory research with girl mothers happens there. Others (e.g., Kanyako 2010) have written about the eff ects of aid fl ows directed towards reconstruction in postwar Sierra Leone. I want to ask how Sierra Leone has been aff ected by transnational fl ows of ‘expertise’. Th e actor-network model is a good extension of Merry’s work because it allows for more creative energy from the bottom up and sees all the participants in the ‘global assemblage’ (Collier and Ong 2005) as active participants in its creation. Translators are no longer stuck in one location, but they are in some ways stuck being representatives of ‘the local’, even when they move to diff erent localities. Clearly there is more research to be done on this topic. Th ese are just preliminary thoughts towards a reframing of a research agenda. I believe the next step is to take Merry further and, after accounting for the various particularities of the localization of diff erent sorts of human rights in diff erent locations, to go beyond the relatively top-down model by focusing more on the kinds of moves (for individuals, but also for ideas and practices) that are possible within those various actor networks.

Susan Shepler is an associate professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC. Her research interests include education, youth, confl ict, forced displacement and transitional justice in confl ict- aff ected West Africa. Her latest book is entitled Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone (New York University Press, 2014). Her scholarly papers have appeared in the Journal of Modern African Studies, Africa Today, An- thropology Today and the Journal of Human Rights. She has worked as a research consultant for UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, Search for Com- mon Ground, Fambul Tok International and Children in Crisis. 250 Susan Shepler

Notes 1. See Shepler (2010a) for more detail on these and other ‘fi rsts’ in child protection for children aff ected by war. 2. Since 2001 Child Protection Offi cers have been posted with Peacekeeping Operations in Sierra Leone, Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Haiti and the Sudan. See http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/issues/ children/cpa.shtml for more information. 3. Offi ce of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Confl ict, ‘Mainstreaming the Issue of Children and Armed Confl ict’. Retrieved 25 Sep- tember 2011 from http://www.un.org/children/confl ict/english/mainstreaming.html. 4. See also Bierschenk, Chauveau and Olivier de Sardan (2002) on ‘local development brokers’. 5. Merry acknowledges this to some extent: ‘Th e term local is, of course, deeply problematic here, as is its oppositional twin global. In the context of discussions of transnationalism, local tends to stand for lack of mobility, wealth, education, and cosmopolitanism, as well as recalcitrant particularity, whereas global encompasses the ability to move across borders, to adopt universal moral frameworks, and to share in the affl uence, education, and cosmopolitan awareness of elites from other parts of the world’ (Merry 2006b: 39). 6. Th is move is in some ways driven by my time as an Assistant Professor in Washington, DC, and the omnipresent insistence on ‘policy relevance’. As a new participant in various child protection networks that include donors and practitioners, I encountered an unfamiliar knowledge economy and discovered I was an ‘expert’. I was even invited to talk about my work at the United Nations by the Special Representative of the Secretary- General on Children and Armed Confl ict, a moment when I most felt a part of transnational child protection expertise. 7. I have spoken elsewhere about the uses of the child soldier narrative in Shepler (2006); see also Meyers (2009) and Coundouriotis (2010). 8. A pseudonym to protect confi dentiality.

References Betancourt, T.S., J. Agnew-Blais, S.E. Gilman, D.R. Williams and B.H. Ellis. 2010. ‘Past Horrors, Present Struggles: Th e Role of Stigma in the Association between War Experi- ences and Psychosocial Adjustment among Former Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone’, Social Science & Medicine 70: 17–26. Bierschenk, T., J.-P. Chauveau and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan. 2002. ‘Local Development Brokers in Africa: Th e Rise of a New Social Category’, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz Working Paper no. 13. Boothby, N., A. Strang and M. Wessells (eds). 2006. A World Turned Upside Down: Social Eco- logical Approaches to Children in War Zones. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Carr, E.S. 2010. ‘Enactments of Expertise’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39(1): 17–32. Collier, S.J., and A. Ong. 2005. ‘Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems’, in A. Ong and S.J. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 3–21. Collins, H., and R. Evans. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coulter, C. 2004. ‘“Th e Aid Business Is My Business”: Young Men and the Humanitarian Regime in Post-War Sierra Leone’. Unpublished manuscript. Child Soldiers and Global Flows of Expertise 251

Coundouriotis, E. 2010. ‘Th e Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historici- zation’, Journal of Human Rights 9(2): 191–206. Goodale, M. 2007. ‘Introduction: Locating Rights, Envisioning Law between the Global and the Local’, in M. Goodale and S.E. Merry (eds), Th e Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–38. Kanyako, V. 2010. ‘Donors and Local Civil Society Interaction in Peacebuilding in Post-War Sierra Leone’, Ph.D. thesis. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University, Institute for Confl ict Analysis and Resolution. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merry, S.E. 2006a. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006b. ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’, American Anthropologist 108(1): 38–51. Meyers, D.T. 2009. ‘Narrative Structures, Narratives of Abuse, and Human Rights’, in L. Tess- man (ed.), Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Th eorizing the Non-Ideal. Houten, the Netherlands: Springer. Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rosen, D. 2005. Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shepler, S. 2005a. ‘Confl icted Childhoods: Fighting over Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone’, Ph.D. thesis. Berkeley, CA: University of California. ———. 2005b. ‘Th e Rites of the Child: Global Discourses of Youth and Reintegrating Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone’, Journal of Human Rights 4(2): 197–211. ———. 2006. ‘Can the Child Soldier Speak?’ Humanitarian Responses to Narratives of In- fl icted Suff ering, 13–15 October 2006. Storrs, University of Connecticut, Human Rights Institute. ———. 2010a. ‘Shifting Priorities in Child Protection in Sierra Leone since Lomé’, in M. Mustapha and J. Bangura (eds), Sierra Leone Beyond Lomé: Challenges and Possibilities for a Post-War Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010b. ‘Are “Child Soldiers” in Sierra Leone a New Phenomenon?’ in J. Knörr and W. Trajano Filho (eds), Th e Powerful Presence of the Past: Integration and Confl ict along the Upper Guinea Coast. Leiden: Brill, pp. 297–322. Stephens, S. (ed.). 1995. Children and the Politics of Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press. Wessells, M. 2007. Child Soldiers: From Violence to Protection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press.

Part IV Interregional Integration

Chapter 13 The ‘Mandingo Question’ Transnational Ethnic Identity and Violent Conflict in an Upper Guinea Coast Border Area Christian K. Højbjerg

This chapter is not available in the open access edition due to rights restrictions. It is accessible in the print and retail e-book editions, spanning pages 255–279. Chapter 14 Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer Transnational Connections and Home Politics in the Twentieth-Century Gambia Alice Bellagamba

British colonial sources of the 1930s make reference to diamond smuggling in the Colony and Protectorate of the Gambia. However, only in the 1990s did the key role of the Gambia in the diamond trade begin to receive attention due to international eff orts to regulate the rough-diamond market and disband the illicit commercial networks that supported confl icts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea-Conakry (Gberie 2009: 75; Smillie 2010: 189–90).1 Pub- lished in 2004, the bestseller Blood Diamonds by journalist Greg Campbell mentions the resettlement of major Gambian diamond dealers in their home country after Charles Taylor toppled the Liberian regime of Samuel Doe in 1989. What Campbell and other analysts left undiscussed is how this return migration of the 1990s followed well-trodden paths laid by the movement of trade and labour forces between the Gambia River and Sierra Leone in earlier decades. Pervasive Mande surnames such as Ceesay, Fofanna, Dumbuyaa and Darboe (Howard 1976; Skinner 1978; Howard and Skinner 1984) betray the common precolonial history of these two regions, whose socioeconomic and political integration was consolidated by the development of the cola trade in the nineteenth century (Curtin 1975: 228–29; White 1981) and by the fact that for several decades British possessions along the Gambia River (the most important of which was Bathurst, established at the river mouth in 1816) were administered as a dependency of Sierra Leone (Gray 1966: 366–78, 457–65). Some of the Bathurst African traders had strong ties to Sierra Leone. One was Joseph D. Richards (Hughes and Perfect 2008: 189–90), who was born in Freetown in 1843 and became a crucial actor in the development of commercial networks between Bathurst and the interior of the Senegambia in the second half of the Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 281 nineteenth century (Mbodji 1992: 216–17). Th e migration of the 1950s, in which thousands of rural Gambian youths sought their fortune in the diamond fi elds of Sierra Leone, was another phase in the long-term history of economic, social and political connections between the Gambia River and Sierra Leone. During that period, news that the Sierra Leonean government had opened up diamond-mining activities to small-scale operators (Swindell 1975: 182) spread rapidly throughout West Africa (Bredeloup 2007: 65ff .). As for the Gambia River area, the rush to the diamond fi elds marked the beginning of the international diaspora, as many of the men who arrived in Sierra Leone in the 1950s then travelled to Congo, Zaire, Liberia and fi nally Angola in the following decades (Gai- bazzi 2010). Th is chapter takes its cue from the life trajectory of Solo Darboe, a former diamond dealer born in the upper Gambia in the 1930s, to illustrate this early transnational aspect of twentieth-century Gambian history. I collected Solo’s life reminiscences in 2008 with the help of Bakary Sidibeh, who for many years was my mentor and research partner in the Gambia. In the years that followed, I met many of Solo’s mates (elderly men such as Omar Suso, a close friend and working partner of Solo) and supplemented oral sources with the available written evidence. Such an exercise of historical reconstruction has broader methodological implications. Philip Curtin (1975) and Boubacar Barry (1998) have promoted the integrated analysis of precolonial Senegambia in terms of its commercial and cultural relationships with Europe, the Americas and the regions that are today part of Mauritania, Mali, Guinea-Conakry and Guinea-Bissau. Historians of the colonial and postcolonial period have instead opted for ‘methodological nationalism’ – i.e., the tendency to frame the analysis mostly in terms of national boundaries (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2003). By probing into the micro-level of Solo’s life trajectory, this chapter attempts to introduce a transnational dimension into the study of the late colonial and postcolonial Gambia, a country that many scholars tend to overlook precisely because of its small size. In so doing, the analysis touches on the crucial role of the fi rst twentieth-century waves of international migrations in the very process of African nation-building.

As a Beginning: Family Ancestry My conversations with Solo took place in Bakau New Town. Th e desirable location and comfortable solidity of his house testiﬁ ed to the wealth of its owner. Bakau is an old coastal village that the British brought under their control during the 1840s. Like other peri-urban areas around the capital city of Banjul, Bakau New Town evolved in the 1970s thanks to increased rural-to-urban migration and investment by the ﬁ rst generation of Gambian civil servants and rich businessmen like Solo. Both Solo and Bakary Sidibeh, who was the intermediary for our encounters, were important actors in the decolonization process. Even if the political historiography of the Gambia barely mentions this detail (Hughes and 282 Alice Bellagamba

Perfect 2006: 136–38), Sidibeh was among the founders of the political movement that brought about the establishment of the Protectorate People’s Party in 1959, whose name was changed to the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) shortly before the fi rst national elections of 1960. Its leader was Dawda Jawara, son of a wealthy rural trader. With support from the colonial government, Jawara was educated in Scotland, and when he returned to the Gambia he was appointed head of the veterinary service. After the 1962 national elections, the PPP assumed leadership of the country (Hughes and Perfect 2006; Bellagamba 2008), and in October 1963, upon the attainment of self-government, Jawara was appointed prime minister. Th at year Solo married Jawara’s niece, Fatouma Almami. With the Republican Referendum of 1970, Jawara became the fi rst president of the Gam- bia. He remained in offi ce until the 1994 military coup that led to the election of Yaya Jammeh, the coup’s leader, as the new president of the Gambia in 1996. When I encountered Solo, the news that Jawara (2009) was working on his autobiography had just spread among his former supporters and age-mates. Solo, who had switched his allegiance to the opposition in the early 1970s after years of providing fi nancial support to Jawara and the PPP, felt that his experience also deserved attention. His self-narrative started with the assertion ‘We are people with history’.2 Th at statement was instrumental in re-marking the boundary between Solo and other members of the twentieth-century Gambian elite, who unlike him could not so easily claim high birth and a historical pedigree. Such was the case of Jawara, whose affi liation with the professional endogamous group of leatherworkers was rumoured from the beginning of his political career (Hughes and Perfect 2006: 136–37). Similar to the Bayo, Ceesay, Danso, Fofanna and Signateh, the Darboe are jula, which means they belong to the precolonial elite of freeborn traders, Islamic scholars and warriors (Curtin 1975: 68–75; Galloway 1974). Th e Darboe family trace their history to their roots in the Casamance village of Tendindi, where their Malian ancestors are said to have fi rst settled during their movement towards the Atlantic coast (Wright 1977: 38). Th e settlements established by the Darboe in the Gambia River Valley strategically intersected with the indigenous and Euro- African trading networks that crossed the Senegambia from north to south and from east to west. Solo’s home village is Brifu, in the Gambian area of the precolonial kingdom of Wuli, not far from the wharves of Wuli Passimass and Yarbutenda, which are mentioned by early European sources on the upper river (Reeve 1912: 131–32). Th e wealth of Solo’s great-grandparents was derived as much from agriculture as from the slave and gold trades, whereas his father, Saloum Darboe, engaged in groundnut cultivation and the cattle trade, as was typical during the early colonial period. Solo grew up in the trading tradition of his family. In accord- ance with customary values, he was raised to be self-disciplined, hardworking and forward-looking. In that conception of life, a young freeman such as Solo Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 283 had to be physically and morally strong as well as ambitious and adventurous to carve out a livelihood. Economic responsibility towards the extended family was a priority, as was the cultivation of leadership aspirations. Like other rural boys, Solo learned to farm and to respect his elders. As befi tted his ancestry, he was also initiated into the ways of trade.3 When he was fi fteen, his father supported his fi rst commercial venture by entrusting him with a small amount of capital with which to enter into petty trade. Solo travelled to Bathurst and headed homeward with a stock of cigarettes, mints, biscuits and other easily transportable items, which he meant to smuggle across the Senegalese border. His fi rst trip, however, was a failure – customs offi cers confi scated all of his goods. When he decided in 1953 to travel to Sierra Leone, his father denied him further fi nancial support because Solo had lost the initial investment to the customs offi cers. Money came instead from his mother, who sold some of her cattle in order to help her son. Th us began Solo’s transnational life, during which he visited and lived in several African countries as well as Belgium and Israel.

Early Sierra Leonean Adventures Colonial sources on the Upper River Division of the Gambia reported the attraction the Sierra Leone diamond fi elds held for young men in the 1950s.4 To be sure, poverty was one of the factors driving them out of their villages. In many areas of rural Gambia, a ‘hungry season’ before the new harvest was the rule (Swindell and Jeng 2006: 59; David 1980), and one of Solo’s age-mates once explained to me how ‘diffi cult it was to stay in the village, if you had nothing’.5 Family members, friends and other villagers expected young men to contribute to the betterment of the community. Th ose who could not, or did not show adequate commitment to hard work, were quickly isolated and treated with con- tempt. Meanwhile, many young men resented the strict social control typical of village life and the labour demands that the government and chiefs imposed on them, such as the maintenance of roads after the rains. Places like 1950s Sierra Leone, or 1960s Congo Brazzaville and Kinshasa, which many international migrants reached after leaving Sierra Leone, were seen as gateways to a more cosmopolitan lifestyle (Abdul-Korah 2008: 2; Hannerz 1992: 228).6 After successfully obtaining a travel permit from the British offi cial in charge of the upper Gambia River, Solo left his home village. At that time, migrants reached Sierra Leone by either riding the postal service ship between Bathurst and Free- town or following the old commercial routes connecting the Upper Gambia to Sierra Leone across the plains of Fouta Djallon. Travellers did not like to cross Guinea-Bissau; the despotic nature of Portuguese colonialism and the regime of forced labour it had in place were notorious throughout the region. Solo followed the road through Fouta Djallon to reach the eastern part of Sierra Leone, not far from the border with Liberia. Th e town was Baima, a locality on the ‘Mende 284 Alice Bellagamba

Line’ railway that connected Freetown to south-eastern Sierra Leone. For trains headed eastward, Baima was the last station before Pendembu, which was located at the intersection of the roads leading to Guinea-Conakry and across the Libe- rian border. In the span of a few years, the population of the nearby diamond areas of Kono, Kenema and Bo districts grew fi fteenfold, from fi ve to seventy-fi ve thousand inhabitants (Stevens 1984: 164). Th e economy was vibrant; shops full of goods, new houses and cars were evidence of the prosperity linked to the diamond industry.

My fi rst destination was Baima Station on Mende Line. I had one hundred pounds, and I gave fi fty pounds to my ‘brother’ to keep so that I could invest the rest in diamond mining. After one month, there was no positive result. I returned to my ‘brother’ to collect my money, as I wanted to start a small business. But the man was twisting and turning me around by saying ‘come tomorrow’, until I realized he had ‘chopped’ [misused] my money. I took up barañini work to survive. I was then told that somebody was looking for help to cut two hundred trees and that he was ready to pay six pounds for the job. I went and asked for a cutlass. I worked hard to cut all the two hundred trees as fast as I could and I carried them on my head. Th e man was surprised and asked me whether I had gone crazy. He had another labourer whom he used to pay three pounds per month. So, the man continued, how could I pretend to do the job so quickly and be paid the equivalent of two months’ salary? He gave me only three pounds and I said: ‘If you want to pay me only three pounds, it is up to you! I will leave it with God!’7 With these three pounds I bought cigarettes to resell. I continued to serve as a porter, carrying bags of rice on my head. Th ey used to pay me three pence. I made gradual savings until I rebuilt my initial capital of fi fty pounds.8

Barañini (literally ‘job-seeker’) is a Mandingo and Bambara word used primarily in the colonial Sahel to identify migrant unskilled labourers (Meillassoux 1965: 140). In the Gambia, it described the young men who served as porters along the river and at the Bathurst harbour during the trading season, from No- vember to May, when the harvest was over and people moved out of the villages in search of labour opportunities. Young Gambians were ready to work hard to earn money to support their families and achieve social autonomy; however, they preferred to do it far from their home communities, where menial jobs were often viewed as those ﬁ lled by the lowest strata of society, such as former slaves and people of slave ancestry. Seasonal farming during the rains or working as barañini in colonial centres after the end of the agricultural season helped overcome status barriers and related behavioural codes: ‘the foreign land’, a local proverb goes, ‘does not know about your good origins, but it can recognize a man of value’.9 Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 285

Th is wisdom applied to freed slaves and slave descendants, who desired to hide their ancestry far from their communities, as well as to freemen like Solo, who in Sierra Leone had to endure forms of humiliation that would have been unac- ceptable at home. As a newcomer, Solo relied on the help of a ‘brother’, a very loose Mandinka expression that may be used to identify a blood relative or simply a person hail- ing from the same village. Relationships between immigrants and Sierra Leone- ans were structured along the principles of the landlord/stranger relation, which had dominated long-distance trading diasporas for centuries. Upon arriving in a new area, an immigrant (or a trader) had to fi nd a landlord who could provide him with lodging, protection and advice in exchange for labour, material support and loyalty. Th e system was based on trust (Zack-Williams 1995; Bredeloup 2007), but agreements were not always honoured, as Solo rapidly discovered. Newcomers had to adjust to the dynamic, rough-and-ready environment of diamond-mining areas full of unscrupulous middlemen and hundreds of thousands of equally ambitious young men. Selfi sh and opportunistic behaviour was the rule more than the exception. Anything could happen, from death – as when men illegally dove into creeks at night in search of diamonds10 – to unexpected strokes of luck. Solo continued to seek out opportunities. Th e story of how he got his fi rst diamond – one he surely has told time and again to friends and relatives – clearly refers to the diamond-smuggling networks between Sierra Leone and Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.

As I did not know diamonds, I established connections with a man in the bush. One day this man showed me a diamond, which according to him was worth fi fteen hundred pounds. I bargained and bargained until I obtained it for thirty-fi ve pounds, but I was not sure of the real value of the stone. In town, I sold it for one thousand and fi ve hundred pounds to a man, who gave me fi ve hundred pounds in advance, and said he would bring the rest after having resold the diamond in Liberia. After two, three days he was back and gave me my money. With that, I started buying and selling diamonds until I had about thirty-fi ve thousand pounds in Monrovia.11

After the discovery of Sierra Leonean diamonds in the 1930s, Liberia became a major diamond exporter, although its government never published reliable statistics on its internal production (Greenhalgh 1985: 204). Th e stones came mostly from Sierra Leone, following the nineteenth-century patterns of trade between the two regions (Rosen 1973: 99–100). Omar Suso, Solo’s best friend in those days, took on the risky activity of transporting diamonds to Monrovia, which he recalled in 2008 when I asked him to talk about his early days with Solo in Sierra Leone: 286 Alice Bellagamba

Solo used to tell me: ‘You know the place where we can sell this diamond. We got it for two thousand dollars, go quickly to Monrovia’. Th at was how I smuggled diamonds into Monrovia. In those days, the police were vigilant, especially when they saw a person travelling to Monrovia. Most of the diamond buyers were in Monrovia. Th ere was a thick forest along the road, and a small hamlet in the bush called Foday Camara, which was already in Liberia. Th e last Sierra Leone village towards that area was located near a river at the border between Sierra Leone and Guinea. When you reached there, you would board a Land Rover; but only few traders ventured to Liberia by land as they would be searched ‘from head to foot’. Police would take oﬀ your trousers to search for diamonds. If they found any, you would be arrested. For me, I always pretended to be the drivers’ apprentice. Both Solo and I were very young at the time. I used to dress like an apprentice. When we reached the police station I would hold on to the back of the vehicle without taking a seat inside. I used to do this with diamonds on me. I would then jump down and say to the police: ‘Quick, we want to go!’ Th ey would push me aside and say: ‘Go away!’ Sometimes, I made two, three trips like this in one month, leaving people behind to spend several days before they could reach Monrovia.12

According to Omar’s account, stones were acquired directly from miners or from small-time intermediaries who commuted between the forest areas and the town of Bo, where Solo eventually settled: ‘When he took the diamond, he would say: “I will be back with your money soon”’. Diamonds were resold in Monrovia, where, Omar said, there were only three diamond-buying offi ces, one of which was owned by the Diamond Corporation, the De Beers branch established in 1929 to manage the supply and trade of rough diamonds (Bredeloup 2007: 36ff .). Money paid to Solo was immediately transferred to his London bank account, and from London it then wended its way back to Sierra Leone. Th is strategy helped circumvent police investigations: as Omar explained, ‘Th e government of Sierra Leone did not enquire about the source of money coming from London’.13 In addition to those who obtained a license to sell and exchange diamonds after the partial liberalization of the diamond market by the Sierra Leone government in 1956, the diamond trade made use of innumerable unlicensed diamond diggers, supporters, distributors and intermediaries (Bredeloup 2007: 108). Th e Lebanese and Jewish trading diaspora played an important role in the system. Beirut wealth during the late 1950s and 1960s was ‘rumored to derive from Sierra Leone profi ts’ (Greenhalgh 1985: 248). Tel Aviv was another important node in the world diamond-trading network, as was London, where many of the Jewish diamond dealers of Antwerp had moved after the outbreak of World War II (Bredeloup 2007: 108–10). Solo’s ability to recognize good stones rapidly Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 287 attracted the attention of Jewish intermediaries linked to the Diamond Corpo- ration. ‘I was not employed’, Solo emphasized in our conversations, ‘but only incorporated as a consultant because of my lack of Western education. I dealt with the Corporation for over forty years. Th ey were buying from me and I was advising them on the values of the diamonds coming to their offi ce’.14 In only a few years, Solo became a grass-roots agent able to gain the trust of African diamond dealers and pass the rough diamonds over to the legal market. His stay in Sierra Leone, however, turned out to be short-lived. Solo and Omar were lucky to escape the 1956 ‘Operation Parasite’, which drove some forty-fi ve thousand foreigners from Kono, one of the major diamond areas (Rosen 1973: 85ff .). But in 1961, Milton Margai’s government expelled them along with Bas- sirou Jawara, another Gambian diamond dealer and a friend of Solo, who like Solo was to become a diamond magnate. Solo, Bassirou and Omar returned to the Gambia, where the political struggle for independence was escalating.

Stranger or Citizen? National Politics on Stage According to Omar, the arrest of Solo and Bassirou happened at the same time as the arrests of Siaka Stevens and many of his supporters on the eve of Sierra Leone’s independence (Cartwright 1970: 70–71). Stevens was the leader of the All People’s Congress and an opponent of Milton Margai’s government. For some years he had served as minister of mines, land and labour, and his intimate knowledge of miners and diamond dealers had alerted him to the political potential of the many immigrants who were living in very diﬃ cult conditions in the diamond areas, a detail that is also mentioned in his autobiography (Stevens 1984; Smillie, Gberie and Hazleton 2001: 41–43). When recalling the story of his arrest, Solo described himself as among Stevens’s many followers:

In 1961, Milton Margai, ﬁ rst Prime Minister of Sierra Leone, deported me. Because I am not a Sierra Leonean, I did not like politics. I like one man only … a retired police sergeant, who formed a party, Siaka Stevens, I gave him so many Land Rovers, so much money, that Milton said, ‘Solo, you cannot stay in Sierra Leone’ and he deported me. When Mil- ton died and Siaka Stevens’s party won, then I was in Israel, and Siaka brought me back to Sierra Leone.15

Milton Margai died in 1964 and was succeeded by his brother, Albert Margai. Stevens won the 1967 election but was then deposed in a coup aimed at reinstating Albert Margai. However, in 1968 Stevens was able to regain power. Th e expansion of the illicit diamond networks during his government, which lasted until 1985, and his ability to cultivate personal connections with major diamond dealers are a well-documented aspect of Sierra Leonean history. 288 Alice Bellagamba

A consistent motif of Solo’s account is the place of migrants in these early 1960s political transformations. When highlighting the role of migrations in the development of Ghanaian nationalistic feelings, Meyer Fortes (1971) referred specifi cally to the Ghanaian elite educated in Europe. Th e same holds true for many other African countries, whose initial cohorts of politicians were educated abroad. Politics also impacted the hundreds of thousands of illiterate rural migrants like Solo, who experienced the on-the-ground implications of national identities while abroad in the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s. If Solo were to delineate his family legacy, Sierra Leone was rightly his second homeland: both the Upper Gambia and Sierra Leone were British territories ruled by a hierarchy of British offi cials and native chiefs, where there were speakers of Mandingo, Solo’s mother tongue, and people bearing his surname. Travelling to Liberia, he could follow the paths of Mande-speaking commercial diasporas and integrate into the vibrant Mande-speaking trading community of Monrovia. Al- most overnight, Sierra Leone’s independence created a new geography of power based on national belonging. Interestingly, the fi rst historical and sociological literature on the place of ‘strangers’ in African societies developed immediately after the birth of the new nations (Peil 1971; Shack and Skinner 1979), when the commercial networks and the mobile labour force that had prospered in the colonial empires had to readjust to the enforcement of national boundaries. Men like Solo found themselves involved in a variety of political transactions. Both abroad and at home, politicians courted the social and material wealth of these businessmen, which they needed to support the emergent political machin- ery (Morgenthau 1979). In addition to supporting Siaka Stevens, Solo cultivated his own social presence in the Gambia. ‘Build your place fi rst!’ is a Gambian saying that has become popular since international migration became an avenue to social mobility in the second half of the twentieth century. Solo’s fi rst investment in social respectability was his father’s pilgrimage to Mecca in 1958. Th e second was to marry Fa- toumata Barro, the maternal cousin whom his parents had chosen to be his wife. Marriage was the gateway to maturity, and migration helped young men to speed up the process by earning enough to assume the marital expenses, a phenomenon that colonial offi cials commented upon as early as the 1890s.16 In 1959, the same year in which the PPP was formed, Solo travelled to the Gambia in order to bring Fatoumata to Sierra Leone. Political discussions, which in the fi rst part of the 1950s had been the preserve of the educated elite of Bathurst, expanded to the rural areas, and the PPP, like Stevens’s All People’s Congress in Sierra Leone and other African parties of that period, cultivated populist promises of equality and progress for all, regardless of social diff erences. Like other prominent families of the Protectorate, branches of the Darboe supported the United Party (UP), which had been established in 1954 by a Ba- thurst lawyer, Pierre N’jie (Hughes and Perfect 2008: 124). Th e UP was strong Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 289 in the upper river region, but the overall political situation in that area of the country was complicated by the many instances of change that criss-crossed society at various levels. Th e PPP’s candidate for the Wuli-Sandu constituency in 1960 was Mussa Darboe, a distant relative of Solo. Th is explains the early interest of Solo and the Darboe of Wuli in the PPP. When Solo returned to the Gambia in 1961, the party had already gained its fi rst victory and was preparing for the second national election of 1962. Expulsion from Sierra Leone had taught Solo and other migrants of those days that good political connections at home could serve them well in case of problems with their host countries abroad as well as in the Gambia, where they were investing the profi ts of their migrations and using the judiciary to defend their business interests. Successful migrants like Solo strove for a social and political presence in the capital city of Bathurst and its elite circles. Not only did cities off er the returnees those facilities to which they had become accustomed abroad, but the emergence of the new nation was turning Bathurst into a hub where national policies were decided, resources shared and contracts signed. In 1963, as I said above, Solo took Jawara’s niece as his second wife. Th is marriage sanctioned his allegiance with the Gambia’s emergent national power bloc. Personal relationships with national political elites became an important part of his transnational life, indirectly testifying to the strict interactions between business minorities and politics in the wake of African independences (Jal- loh 2007: 90),17 and to the commitment of African presidents with respect to the growth of ‘shadow’ states – that is, patrimonial networks interlaced with the formal institutions of the state (Reno 1999, 2000; Ferguson 2006: 39). In that same year of 1963, Solo established himself in Congo Brazzaville. Since the early colonial period the capital had hosted an important West African trading community (Balandier 1955; Bredeloup 2007: 1959; Whitehouse 2007). Solo and other West African men coming from the Sierra Leone diamond fi elds used already existing West African trading networks to develop smuggling activities within the former Belgian Congo, which at the time held a large share of the world’s diamond production (Bredeloup 1994: 82; MacGaff ey 1987: 121–22). In Brazzaville, Solo had a license to buy diamonds. Omar and other Gam- bians he had known in Sierra Leone served as couriers across the border with Congo Leopoldville. Solo’s fi rst wife played a part as well, as Omar recalled:

Because of the diﬃ culties of access to Congo Brazzaville we used to take planes from Leopoldville to Lagos, and then back from Lagos to Brazza- ville. Th e president of Congo Brazzaville was named Massemba-Débat. Massemba and Solo were close friends as ‘honey and honey producer’.18 Solo was so popular that many thought he was one of the President’s closest associates. He was given security guards for the compound, and the key to the large safety box, where he kept the currency (franc CFA, 290 Alice Bellagamba

dollars and pounds) that was in the hands of Fatoumata, his first wife. When Solo negotiated the price of a diamond, Fatoumata would take out the money.19

At that time, West African diamond dealers were taking advantage of the weakened control over the diamond trade that followed Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960, and of the development of clandestine diamond mining in Eastern Kasai (MacGaffey 1987: 122–23). This favourable situation ended with the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko, who began to install those loyal to him into the system in order to gain control over it (Smillie 2010: 121–22). Solo left Brazzaville – having lost his political patronage after the overthrow of Massemba-Débat in 1968 – and added Belgium and Israel to his transnational life experience: ‘I was the only African in Tel Aviv who had a diamond trading office. Usually I got to the airport, took the diamonds from my customers and declared them to customs’.20 In 1972 he opened an office in Monrovia. In one way or another – he could not specifically recall how it had come about – while in Sierra Leone he had established a friendly relationship with Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea-Conakry. Once again, diamonds were the reason for that friendship, as presumably Solo was participating in the illicit diamond transactions carried out by Touré and members of his extended family.21 Touré introduced him to William Tolbert, the Liberian president whose favouritism towards Mande-speaking minorities is well known (Konneh 1996: 149), and Solo settled in Monrovia. With Solo’s relationship with the Gambia compromised after the 1981 attempted coup against Jawara’s government, and Solo himself, according to his own account, suspected of playing a role in the conspiracy, it proved a providential time to leave the Gambia and draw upon Sékou Touré’s friendship. A few years before, Solo had withdrawn from the PPP to become an active member and financial supporter of the National Convention Party (NCP), an opposition party established in 1975 by Sheriff Dibba, who had been a founding member of the PPP and the first vice president of the Gambia (Hughes and Perfect 2006: 191).22

Never Really at Home Solo’s passion for politics is revealed by the nicknames of three of his sons: Rea- gan, Sékou Touré and Sheriff Dibba. Solo’s relations with Dibba developed in the context of popular dissatisfaction with the PPP in the early 1970s and rising concerns among the Mandinka regarding Jawara’s policy of assimilation of other ethnic groups into the government (Hughes and Perfect 2006: 187–90). No doubt Solo felt and acted like a Mandingo nationalist proudly defending his culture and language. It was in the 1970s that the Gambia’s economic problems started to come to the fore. Urban suburbs had swollen as a consequence of intensified mi- Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 291 gration from rural areas, and the state’s administrative apparatus – despite its signifi cant growth (Sallah 1990: 628) – could not provide enough white-collars jobs for the increasing numbers of literate youths, who looked to Europe, the United States and Libya in search of better educational and employment opportunities. Electoral politics had turned into an instrument to guarantee the continuity of the political circles established at the time of independence. No room was left for innovative thinking and action besides what the PPP and its politicians needed to remain in power. Solo was a transnational migrant, but the rest of his family aimed at maintaining their long-term social and political infl uence in the Upper Gambia. One of his younger brothers had political aspirations, and apparently the PPP had withdrawn its support of his candidacy for Member of Parliament for the Wuli constituency in the 1977 elections (Hughes and Perfect 2006: 191). Solo reacted by shifting his allegiance to the NCP and provided this new party with access to a secure source of fi nancing for political rallies and propaganda to support his brother there. At the time, Solo’s material and social capital was impressive. While abroad, he kept in touch with expatriate Gambians and helped those in diffi culty. Locally, his family network spread at the regional and transregional levels. Moreover, he had been investing in his home village since the beginning of his diamond-dealing career by paying the taxes of a large number of people and by providing food when they were in need. In the eyes of his countrymen, Solo came across as a hero, deftly able to tap the riches of foreign nations. His fi rst return from Sierra Leone, in 1961, was still remembered by his age-mates as recently as 2008. Solo and his friend Bassirou Jawara were each driving a brand- new car, which stoked the imagination of their compatriots. Only a few years later, this time back from Congo Brazzaville, Solo patronized the band Super Eagles, whose music spread from Banjul nightclubs to the international stage.23 Th is display of success and cosmopolitan connections was in sharp contrast to the distress of 1970s rural and urban Gambia (Nyang 1977; Sallah 1990). Re- current droughts and badly organized government intervention had struck heavy blows to the agricultural sector, which still constituted the main source of income for large segments of the population. Infl ation had turned life in towns into a never-ending struggle to make ends meet, and people were leaving the rural areas to settle in the rapidly growing urban centres. In 1977 Solo organized the NCP campaign, and his younger brother contested the Wuli constituency under the fl ag of the new party (Hughes and Perfect 2006: 191–94). Th e NCP, however, never achieved the results that its founder, and Solo, expected. It proved hard indeed to undermine the popularity of the PPP as the party that had achieved independence. Th e PPP’s patronage resources, moreover, were far more dependable than those of the NCP. In his explanation of these events, Solo mentioned a letter that Jawara purportedly wrote to him, which contained one sentence that Solo would never forget: ‘You are a king without a 292 Alice Bellagamba land!’ Th e meaning becomes clearer in the light of Solo’s common expression ‘I am the king of the world’, used when he boasted about his adventures abroad. By adding ‘without a land’, Jawara put things in the diff erent perspective. Solo’s transnational life was both a resource and a hindrance. Surely, his connections to diff erent places in the world increased his social and moral stature by comparison with those compatriots who had never had the opportunity to leave the Gambia, but his absences undermined his ability to establish roots in the thickly connected environment of home politics. It was Binta Cham, his youngest wife, who clearly spelled out this point by interjecting, during one of my conversations with Solo:

You can live with Gambians outside, they would not care about you. You will see them only when they are in need. Here, at home, they also do not care. When you return and you visit them, they will start the conversation by saying, ‘When did you arrive? When are you going to leave?’ Th ey talk as if you do not belong to this country.

Transnational theory has shown how migrants’ investments in their home country have fed long-distance nationalism (Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001). Th is applies to Solo and other migrants of his generation who, while making a point of cultivating patriotism, were also subject to the tenuous nature of relationships between the Gambian state and its diasporic citizenry. Th e social and material capital of migrants was welcomed as long as it aligned with the incum- bent leader; however, the very fact that Solo was accused of participation in the 1981 coup against Jawara shows that migrants’ use of their resources to support political alternatives prompted a much diff erent reaction from the government. Behind the mask of an extremely successful life, Solo’s trajectory therefore betrays a feeling that he never fully belonged to his home country. Of all the political connections he established during his career as a diamond dealer, the friendship with Sékou Touré is the only one I heard him describe nostalgically; further, he evinced an enduring admiration for this man, whom he aff ectionately called ‘my African President number one’. For the rest, by 2008 – like many men of his generation who truly believed in the transformative power of national politics during their youth – he had reached the conclusion that politics and politicians were not worth any further fi nancial, social or moral engagement. Both Jawara and Dibba had disillusioned him. His relationship with Dibba had ended before the 1992 national elections, when Solo was expelled from the NCP. From Dibba’s point of view, Solo’s independent attitude was undermining the cohesiveness of the party; from Solo’s perspective – which the opposition newspaper Foroyaa duly documented – Dibba had mismanaged NCP fi nancial resources. For those elections Solo backed a newly established and small political party, the People’s Democratic Party, whose existence was abruptly terminated by the Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 293 political ban proclaimed by the military junta after the 1994 coup. Solo left the Gambia again. At this time Angola was liberalizing diamond mining and trading operations (Bredeloup 2007: 43). Solo tried to become a key player once again in a new diamond frontier, but he was not as successful as he used to be. Angola marked the end of his adventures as a diamond dealer. In one of our 2008 conversations he remarked: ‘I cannot leave diamonds; even now, if asked, I could buy one-million-dollar stones in half an hour; the knowledge is still here’. But despite this assertion, Solo also made it clear to Sidibeh and myself that his time for adventure had come to an end: ‘I do not travel much these days.’ Not only had international border security become stricter and controls more diffi cult to evade, but the political connections that helped him to secure his life and activities both in the Gambia and abroad were gone. Th us, after a transnational life during which he had crossed countries, territories and cultures in a way that none of his nineteenth-century jula ancestors could ever have imagined, Solo grew old in his home country – a common experience for many of his generation’s international migrants. Having prudently invested the proceeds of his activities in real estate, he had what he needed for a comfortable life that, although modest if compared to other periods of his life, was still out of reach for most Gambians. His children, most of whom lived in Europe or the United States, have been his major investment. Solo never went to school, but he soon understood the importance of literacy in the new world emerging out of decolonization. In his early days as a diamond dealer he had to write his name over and over to learn how to sign his fi rst cheque. Most of his children have studied abroad, and even the one who has chosen to follow in his father’s footsteps and take up diamond dealing holds a master’s degree from a London university. In 2008, when I met Solo, this son was thinking of opening up a gold mining site in Guinea, where he could count on Solo’s relationship with Lansana Conté. Th at relationship had been established when Lansana Conté was serving Sékou Touré, and Solo was welcomed at the Guinea-Conakry presidential palace.

Conclusion Th rough life histories one can study macrohistorical processes at the microhistor- ical level, fl eshing out the aspirations, feelings and experiences of individual men and women at specifi c points in time and under broader sociocultural constraints (Th omson 1999; Fog Olwig 2007: 17). Th e rich details typical of this kind of evidence can trigger analyses in a plurality of diverging directions. In this chapter, I have focused on two aspects of Solo’s trajectory. Th e fi rst is his exemplary capacity for grasping the global opportunities created by the expansion of the diamond industry in the 1950s. Many of his countrymen tried to do the same, but few matched his success. Th e second is Solo’s political engagement, in that his social trajectory serves as a summary of the highly personal relationships he 294 Alice Bellagamba was able to establish with some of the major political personalities of twentieth- century Africa. Th ose connections were in part instrumental to his activities as a diamond dealer, but his engagement in home politics is also representative of the aspirations and commitment of an entire African generation that saw the end of colonial rule and actively participated in the creation and development of the new nations. Men of this generation keenly desired to be recognized as active members of their home communities but at the same time also had hopes for social and political change on a national scale. Th is held true also for Solo, in spite of the fact that his close association with notoriously corrupt, neopatrimonial regimes and his activities as diamond dealer may give the impression that his life trajectory was determined more by opportunities for economic gain than by any idealistic motivation.

Acknowledgements Th is chapter was completed thanks to funding from the European Research Coun- cil under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013)/ERC Grant agreement 313737, ‘Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond: A Historical Anthropology’. Fieldwork was carried out from 2008 to 2010 under the auspices of MEBAO (Missione Etnologica in Bénin e Africa Occidentale), an Italian research network focused on West Africa that I have directed since 2000. I thank Solo Darboe, his wife Binta Cham, Bakary Sidibeh and the other elders who shared their knowledge of this relatively unexplored area of Gambian twentieth-century history. Lorenzo d’Angelo, Paolo Gaibazzi and David Perfect contributed precious historical and ethnographic information. My gratitude goes also to the EURIAS Program, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for their generous support of my research eﬀ orts.

Alice Bellagamba is an associate professor of cultural anthropology and African studies at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She is the author of Ethnographie, histoire et colonialism en Gambie (Harmattan, 2002) and L’Africa e la stregone- ria. Saggio di antropologia storica (Editori Laterza, 2008). Together with Sandra Greene and Martin Klein she edited the volume African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade. Vol. 1: Th e Sources (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Th e Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present (Markus Wiener, 2013). In 2004 and 2005 she was an Alexander Humboldt fellow at the University of Bayreuth; in 2011 and 2012 she was a EURIAS senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Berlin; and in 2013 she was a visiting fellow of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition of Yale University. Cur- rently she holds a European Research Council Grant to study the aftermath of Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer 295 abolition and the emergence of contemporary slavery-like forms of oppression in a comparative perspective (Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond: A Historical Anthropology).

Notes 1. Gambian National Archive (GNA), Banjul, the Gambia, CSO 4/74, Consolidated Afri- can Selection Trust Ltd. Request for Legislation Preventing Illicit Diamond Trade (1938). 2. Solo Darboe, Bakau New Town, 24 November 2008. 3. Bakoyo and Omar Suso, Dippakunda, 16 October 2006. 4. National Archives of Th e Gambia, Banjul, CRU1-4, Upper River Divisional Bulletin 8 and 9 (1956). 5. Baba Suso, Fajikunda, 18 January 2008. 6. Literature of the 1950s and 1960s on African migrations commonly stresses the importance of economic factors, such as the need to pay colonial taxes (e.g. Skinner 1960). It also casts light on the cultural signiﬁ cance of migration. For instance, Jean Rouch’s 1956 study of migrations from Niger to the Gold Coast concerns the mobility of youth labour as the expression of a long-rooted tradition of travel and the yearning for ‘adventure’. According to Isaac Schapera (1947), the same aspirations underpinned Tswana colonial migrations. See also Bredeloup (2008) and Timera (2009). 7. ‘I leave it with God’ is a common Gambian expression that people use when they are mistreated in order to stress their forbearance and their faith in a higher form of justice. 8. Solo Darboe, Bakau New Town, 24 November 2008. 9. Th is Soninke, Bambara and Mandinka proverb is widespread not only in the Upper Gam- bia but also in eastern Senegal and Mali (Whitehouse 2007: 301; Whitehouse 2012). 10. Junkung Sumbundu, Koto Quarry, 29 November 2008. 11. Solo Darboe, Bakau New Town, 24 November 2008. 12. Omar Suso, Dippakunda, 19 December 2008. 13. Omar Suso, Dippakunda, 19 December 2008. 14. Solo Darboe, Bakau New Town, 24 November 2008. 15. Solo Darboe, Bakau New Town, 24 November 2008. 16. Gambian National Archives, Banjul, ARP 28/1, Travelling Commissioner’s Report for December 1893. 17. Alusine Jalloh (2007) refers to Fula minorities in Sierra Leone. For other comparative analyses, see Meillassoux (1965) on the relationships between Bamako businessmen and the Malian-educated political and administrative elite; Morgenthau (1979) on the place of foreigners and multinationals in African national politics; and Diamond (1987) on private business’s structural dependence on government assistance in the postcolonial Af- rican state. 18. Omar Suso was a griot, e.g. a praise-singer and oral historian. To make his point, he often used expressions drawn from Gambian oral traditions, such as this reference to honey and honey producer, which is a common way to stress the close relationship of two people. 19. Omar Suso, Dippakunda, 19 December 2008. 20. Solo Darboe, Bakau New Town, 24 November 2008. 21. Guinea-Conakry is a diamond-producing country on a level with Sierra Leone, but mining activities were nationalized by Sékou Touré in 1961 (Gberie 2011: 6–7). Although this reduced overall production, Sékou Touré continued to encourage illicit miners and smugglers (Greenhalgh 1985: 259; Morice 1987: 13; Bah 1990). 296 Alice Bellagamba

22. Solo Darboe, Bakau New Town, 25 November 2008. 23. For more details see ‘Super Eagles: Senegambian Sensation’: http://www.discogs.com/ Super-Eagles-Senegambian-Sensation/release/3264679

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Schapera, I. 1947. Migrant Labour and Tribal Life: A Study of Conditions in the Beehuanaland Protectorate. London: Oxford University Press. Shack, A., and E. Skinner (eds). 1979. Strangers in African Societies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Skinner, D. 1978. ‘Mande Settlement and the Development of Islamic Institutions in Sierra Leone’, Th e International Journal of African Historical Studies 11(1): 32–62. Skinner, E.P. 1960. ‘Labour Migration and Its Relationship to Socio-cultural Change in Mossi Society’, Africa 30(4): 375–401. Smillie, I. 2010. Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade. London and New York: Anthem Press. Smillie, I., L. Gberie and R. Hazleton. 2001. Th e Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security. Ottawa: Partnership Africa-Canada. Stevens, S. 1984. What Life Has Taught Me: Th e Autobiography of President Siaka Stevens of Sierra Leone. London: Kensal Press. Swindell, K. 1975. ‘Mining Workers in Sierra Leone: Th eir Stability and Marital Status’, Afri- can Aﬀ airs 74(295): 180–90. Swindell, K., and A. Jeng. 2006. Migrants, Credit and Climate: Th e Gambian Groundnut Trade, 1834–1934. Leiden: Brill. Th omson, A. 1999. ‘Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies’, Oral History 27(1): 24–37. Timera, M. 2009. ‘Aventuriers ou orpheline de la migration internationale? Nouveaux et an- ciens migrants subsahariens au Maroc’, Politique Africaine 115: 175–96. White, F. 1981. ‘Creole Women Traders in the Nineteenth Century’, Th e International Journal of African Historical Studies 14(4): 626–42. Whitehouse, B. 2007. ‘Exile Knows No Dignity: African Transnational Migrants and the An- choring of Identity’, Ph.D. thesis. Providence: Brown University. ———. 2012. Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, Dignity, Belonging. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press. Wimmer, A., and N. Glick Schiller. 2003. ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology’, International Migra- tion Review 37(3): 576–610. Wright, D. 1977. ‘Darbo Jula: Th e Role of a Mandinka Jula Clan in the Long-Distance Trade of the Gambia River and Its Hinterland’, African Economic History 3: 33–45. Zack-Williams, A.B. 1995. Tributors , Supporters and Merchant Capital: Mining and Under- development in Sierra Leone. Aldershot: Avebury. Chapter 15 Market Networks and Warfare A Comparison of the Seventeenth-Century Blade Weapons Trade and the Nineteenth-Century Firearms Trade in Casamance Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta

Introduction Seaborne commerce between West Africa and Europe was fi rst established in the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries along the coast of Senegambia.1 Within the northern reaches of ‘Guiné do Cabo Verde’, the Casamance region (south-western present-day Senegal) became an early focus for this commerce. Th e enduring structures of the burgeoning Atlantic trade were established there by the late sixteenth century. Among the lasting characteristics of Atlantic commerce was the importation of weapons from overseas. Th e early weapons trade, primarily in ‘armas brancas’ or steel swords and daggers, connected Casamance, through Senegambian trade networks, to a global web of production and commerce that extended not only to Europe but also to North Africa, the Indian Ocean and Spanish America. Th e blade weapons trade expanded early in the seventeenth century, by which time it was tied inextricably to the slave trade; weapons fi gured signifi - cantly among the goods exchanged for captives. Two centuries later, as the Casa- mance entered the geopolitical orbits of France and England on the eve of the colonial period, the weapons trade again came to play a prominent role in overseas exchange with Europe. Th is time, however, it was not blade weapons but re-fi arms that were imported into Casamance. Our chapter describes and compares the two stages in the weapons trade to the Casamance. Although the twentieth century lies outside the focus of our research, the observer may ironically wonder whether the contemporary independence struggle in the Casamance constitutes a third act in the importation of weapons to this beautiful but volatile land. 300 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta

We will revisit Martin Klein’s classic article, published in 1972 in Th e Jour- nal of African History and entitled ‘Social and Economic Factors in the Muslim Revolution in Senegambia’. Klein argued cogently that nineteenth-century legitimate commerce diff ered from the earlier slave trade in that goods imported into Senegambia were far more widely distributed than the earlier trade items. Th e result, he argued, was to foster a process of political change that ultimately challenged and then toppled the old warrior elite. He interpreted the ostensibly Islamic warfare of the mid and late nineteenth century as being a result of this more widespread dissemination of wealth from trade, including fi rearms. Confi rming Klein’s main thesis, we raise new evidence to support it. Further, by taking a comparative approach we widen the context that led to transformations in the arms trade. Th ese historical changes become thoroughly understandable when placed within their interregional and transnational context in diff erent periods. We compare the spread of guns to the earlier (1590–1620 and later) spread of cavalry swords and daggers on the northern Upper Guinea Coast and, in smaller numbers, in southern Guiné do Cabo Verde. Th is blade weapons trade was almost wholly unknown before our recent research, published in our book Th e Forgotten Diaspora. In fact, the blade weapons trade was a crucial element facilitating the growing importance of cavalry in Senegambia. Th is historical development, in turn, helped to entrench the warrior elite whose decline Klein traces. (Another factor in the earlier rise of cavalry, the desiccation of coastal areas, is covered by George Brooks [1993] in his discussion of climate change.) So our research confi rms the impact of trade on warfare. Th e inclusion of blade weapons in the early history of Senegambian warfare and trade makes the picture more complex. Th e model of a ‘horse-slave cycle’ followed by a ‘gun-slave cycle’ is not an accurate assessment of the role of Atlantic markets in the regional slave trade.2 Not that another ‘cycle’ – of blade weapons – should be added: the chronology of blade arms extends into the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contemporary with the introduction of guns in Senegambian markets. But blades could also be produced locally. Th us, African markets made their choices about when to take the opportunity to import ‘armas brancas’ from the Atlantic. For the nineteenth century, besides revisiting Klein, we have uncovered new information on the traffi c in fi rearms in the Casamance. Oral sources collected in 1975 by Mark, correlated with French archival records from c 1860, testify to the mid-nineteenth-century circulation of fi rearms from England and France in several Jola [Diola] communities of the Casamance. Th e presence of these weapons, even in limited numbers, in a northern Jola society characterized by small-scale polities attests that, as Klein argues, guns were more widely distributed than were the means of warfare in the earlier age of cavalry and blade weapons. Th ese developments are also connected, as happened throughout Guiné do Cabo Verde, with changes within Euro-African trade networks and the European presence. In 1886, the year that France acquired Ziguinchor and the territory Market Networks and Warfare 301 along the south bank of the Casamance River from Portugal, thereby marking the advent of French colonial power in the region, the people of northern Casa- mance successfully fought off a raid by the Manding warriors of Combo Sylla. Th is Jola victory was possible because several villages that were traditional enemies had allied with each other. Th e defeat of Sylla was also achieved because the local communities had amassed suffi cient guns to defend themselves against mounted cavalrymen. Th is, too, clearly illustrates the accuracy of Klein’s model.

Part I: Th e Seventeenth Century Recently discovered sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archival documents of the Lisbon Inquisition illustrate the production of blade weapons, or ‘armas brancas’, by Lisbon-based artisans. Th ese men worked with traders who, in turn, contracted for the swords. Many of these contractors were New Christians. Th eir work is documented for the thirty-year period from 1590 to 1618.3 Th e weapons were transported to the rivers of Guinea, where they were traded to African elites.4 After 1608, the approximately three dozen Jewish merchants who had settled on the Petite Côte became important players in this coastal commerce. In West Africa, the weapons were exchanged for slaves and other goods. Th is commerce in swords and daggers contravened a Papal Bull that prohibited Catholics from trading weapons to non-Christians. Th e commerce, largely ignored by historians,5 is corroborated by Portuguese travel narratives from the period. Both the production and the military use of ‘armas brancas’ – a name that refers to the white tinge of steel-bladed hand weapons – were highly developed in Portugal. Th ese specialized arms came in many diff erent forms. Espadas were double-edged, full-length swords wielded in the right hand. Th e more readily handled terçados (or espadas curtas, short swords), mentioned above, were ideal for cavalry use. Shorter arms took the form of adagas with a broad, short, pointed blade, generally with two cutting edges, and punhais with narrower, shorter blades. In Lisbon in the second decade of the seventeenth century, a minimum of 300 swords but perhaps as many as 500 or 600 were produced annually for export to Upper Guinea. Over the period of eight or nine years documented by the Inquisition report of 1618, this trade would have totalled between 2,500 and 5,000 weapons.6 Th e fi gures for the 1590s may have been slightly higher, as the Inquisition documents list eight artisans for that period.7 Production of these weapons was truly an international activity. Only the assembly and decoration of the swords and scabbards took place in Lisbon. Th ere, espadeiros or barbeiros de espadas assembled the fi nished weapons from blades that they imported from Italy and from Flanders. One type of sword, the terçado, was about 77 to 88 cm long.8 Weapons made in Europe were not the only ones to arrive on the northern Upper Guinea Coast. Documents discovered by Linda Newson and Susie Min chin 302 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta in the Archivio General de la Nación in Lima, Peru, document swords exported from India as part of the same worldwide network. In the African markets, these oriental weapons were even more highly valued than European-made weapons.9 As other European nations challenged Portugal’s trading monopoly, the ban on selling weapons to non-Christians could not be enforced. Two of the competitors, England and the United Provinces, were not Catholic states. Th eir merchants ignored the Papal ban with impunity, as did French Huguenot privateers. Portuguese lançados and their Luso-African descendants who had settled among African populations on the West African mainland quickly entered into contact with the French, English and Dutch interlopers, providing them with African trade goods in return for weapons. Th ere is evidence that as early as c 1590, Protestant ‘pirates’ (as the Portuguese refer to them) also brought blade weapons directly to Northern Senegal.10 Unsurprisingly, after the Inquisition discovered the Lisbon-based sword- trade network, an alternative had to be found to pursue this important trade. Th is alternative was the use of French ports to bring weapons from Portugal to the African markets. As early as c 1622 the former governor D. Francisco de Moura (1618–1622) stated in a memorial addressed to the king that

As [the ‘gentes da Nação’] were forbidden by the Contractor [of the Guinea trade] to bring from this Kingdom [Portugal] forbidden merchandise, not granting any ships licences to sail to Guinea, they pass this merchandise to France. From there they take the goods to the Coast (Petite Côte), trading more by this way than by the Kingdom, and they come from Cacheu to collect [the swords] and hide them in their houses.11

Th ese short swords and daggers served primarily to arm cavalry. Th e horses were acquired from European merchants along the coast and, in the interior, from the ‘Moors’. Th ese Arab-Berber merchants may have been the commercial me- diators between the coast and the Sahelian hinterland.12 Th e European export of weapons to West Africa was actually part of a complex intercontinental and interregional traffi c. Th e Atlantic trade complemented the caravan traffi c across the southern Sahara, which provided horses from Arguim and across the Sahel (Austen 1993: 311–50). Yet even in the forested coastal zone to the south, blade weapons were highly in demand. In the Casamance and in northern Guinea-Bissau, where the heavier forest- ation rendered cavalry ineff ective, soldiers were armed with iron weapons and, when possible, espadas. In the Oporto manuscript of his Tratado (1594), Almada writes of the Cassangas of the Casamance, who were redoubtable warriors: ‘In warfare they use spears, arrows, shields, knives, short swords like the Wolof, and the same clothing.’13 In these southern regions in the late sixteenth century, short Market Networks and Warfare 303 swords would also have been used, in fewer numbers, by elite cavalry; infantry too used similar types of weapons. Th e fact that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century accounts attest to the scarcity of horses in the kingdom of ‘Casamança’ (then called Kasa) – horses were imported only among the elite14 – seems to confi rm that small numbers of cavalry swords would have been used in Casamance. In fact, the animals most frequently used for travel through the forested coastal region between the Casamance and Geba Rivers were not horses at all, but cattle. Almada off ers several accounts of local rulers riding on bulls. ‘Th e Kings of this land’, he writes, ‘occasionally ride about on horses, but most of the time they use bulls, if the journey is short.’15 Th ere are other references to royal use of horses among the Biafada peoples of present-day Guinea-Bissau.16

From the Casamance to the Geba, the Blacks rarely rode on horses. A few ‘Kings’ and ‘nobles’ (ﬁ dalgos, individuals ranked high by lineage) did, but rarely. Most of the time they went about on cows or bulls, which in these parts they tame and pierce through the nose by means of which the animals wear rope similar to a bit, with which they guide the animals. And in this manner they can travel for several days and they have a very good ride; the same method is used among the Casangas, Banhuns, Buramos and Bijagós.17

South of the Rio Grande, in Nalu land, no horses were used or traded (Almada 1594 [1964]: 112). In Sierra Leone cavalry are only mentioned among the Manes, coming from the Mande savannah heartland. Nevertheless, even if cavalry was essentially absent in the forest zone, the use of short swords by infantry was not precluded. A later report, the 1663–1664 account of the Franciscan Friar André de Faro, may attest to the extension of the short swords market, referring to the abundance of ‘traçados’ (terçados) in the ‘Kingdom of the Banhuns (Bainuk)’, namely in the port of Quinguim.18 In no known account from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century is there any mention of Felupe19 use of short swords. Further south, blade weapons were found during this period among the Buramos/Papel and Biafada, as well as the ‘Sapes’ and Manes in the Guinea-Conakry and Sierra Leone regions, according to Almada (1594 [1964]: 69, 73, 132, 139), Jesuit sources (Brásio 1968: 393) and Franciscan sources (Brásio 1991: 242). Th e use of these weapons by both the Sapes and the Manes, who had moved into their territory in the mid-sixteenth century, could have implications for the historical reassessment of the Mane ‘invasions’.20 In fact, if the means of defence and destruction were not substantially diff erent between the local Sapes and the Manes (Hair 1977: n. 169, 263)21 coming from the Futa Jalon, the unbalanced relation between them, which changed the political map of Sierra Leone, must be found elsewhere. It 304 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta was based less on warfare technology than on tactics and military formation22 as well as demographic factors between local societies that were politically more fragmentary, facing the Manes’ migrations. Th e role played in the region by a diff erent type of weapons, guns, is attested by Francisco de Lemos Coelho’s descriptions of 1669 and 1684. Th ese accounts give information primarily from the 1650s and 1660s. Lemos Coelho reports that fi rearms were imported in the Gambia region and adds important references to the Casamance region:

All of these above-named Kingdoms of the Banhuns, four in number outside of the Kasa Mansa, say that they were subjugated to the Kasa Mansa, and today they all live in liberty, they do not observe any religion, even if there is no lack of Manding who delude them with their cheating and the Falupos live in more barbarian manner and they have no communication with these people, and among them the Catholic religion could gain adherents and even more towards the south, the goods that are needed for these rivers are iron and kola and textiles and crystal and amber and spirits and powder and escopetas (short guns) and black, white and tile colour glass beads.23

Clearly, short guns (fl intlock muskets) were only one among many desired trading items (Peres 1990). Iron was more in demand, as local blacksmiths could fashion it into both agricultural implements and blade weapons. Th e crucial point is that the only local use of imported fi rearms in the Casa- mance region clearly evoked by Lemos Coelho is hunting: the Bainunk of the independent kingdom of Jasé considered themselves experts in shooting.24 No- where does Coelho or the slightly earlier writing of Father André de Faro refer to the use of guns in warfare, although Europeans may have used them against the Africans. Blade weapons seem still to have been the main weapon. Th is would shortly change, however. John Th ornton has gathered evidence that European muskets introduced in the armies of Casamance (and the Gambia) in the 1670s as infantry weapons were decisive in the Casamance king’s defeat of an English naval attack (Th ornton 1999: 45 and 12 n. 11–12). Be that as it may, the growing quest for fi rearms in connection with the growth of the Senegambian slave trade from the late seventeenth century onwards is asserted by Walter Rodney (1970) in A History of the Upper Guinea Coast and confi rmed by Philip Curtin’s (1975) statistics of gun imports.

Part II: Th e Nineteenth Century Although there may have been some continuity of trade from the late seventeenth century (which we do not intend to study in this chapter), by the early Market Networks and Warfare 305 nineteenth century there were still relatively few fi rearms in Casamance. Ac- cording to George Brooks, during the eighteenth century Diola groups began to exclude Europeans and Eurafricans from the waterways linking the Gambia, Casamance, Cacheu and Geba Rivers, thus forcing Portuguese and Luso-Africans to use sea passages in longer sailing routes between trading posts like Ziguinchor and Cacheu. Th e closing of the Senegal and Gambia Rivers to slave trade in 1809 and 1816 caused a redirection of caravans of African slave traders to Casamance and southwards, hence to the profi t of Portuguese and Luso-African slave traders (though there is evidence that inland water routes south of the Casamance River were still used in the early nineteenth century). But Brooks does not mention weapons among the products of what he names the ‘Cacheu-Casamance commercial sphere’ between the 1780s and the 1810s. After 1816 these Luso-African traders’ activities were more severely aff ected by French and Franco-Africans and English and Anglo-Africans who became either their competitors or collaborators (Brooks 2010: xviii, 4, 47ff ., 161). Firearms were acquired from the English trading post at Elinkin in the mouth of the Casamance River, near the island of Carabane. In 1836–37, however, French offi cials opened two trading posts in the Casamance. Th e fort they constructed at Sedhiou, relatively far east in ‘Moyen Casamance’, followed the old Portuguese and Luso-African model of establishing trading escales at the point where the westward-fl owing rivers became impassable for any but the smallest draft vessels. Th e other trading post was on Carabane Island, near the mouth of the river. Th ere, as Mark (1985: 56) wrote, ‘Within months of the opening of the new comptoir, Diolas from both banks of the river were coming to exchange quantities of rice and wax for guns, textiles, iron, copper, and other items’. Th is provided the local populations in the lower river with a second source of fi rearms. Previously, they had purchased guns from the English trading post established early in the century at Elinkin. An undated report that is apparently from 1850 states that Lower Casamance villages were armed with ‘guns, which they acquire from the English.’25 Th e French offi cial in the region, E. Bertrand-Bocandé, wrote that year that Elinkin (the etymology comes from ‘Lincoln’) was still ‘un hameau anglais’[‘an English hamlet’].26 During his visit to Th ionk-Essyl, the largest community in the region of Djougoutes, Bertrand-Bocandé estimated that 800 to 1,000 men of this village cluster were armed with guns.27 By mid-century, some northern Jola were travelling to English Combo (in the Gambia) to obtain trade goods, most likely including weapons. Th ese the Jo- las acquired in exchange for captives and cattle,28 but also and primarily for rice, their staple crop and the basis of their fi nancial transactions (Mark 1985: 64). With the establishment of a French trading post at Carabane, people from Djougoutes – a heavily populated plateau north of the Casamance River – travelled to Carabane to work as labourers and sell cattle, some of which they had stolen from neighbouring communities. Early on, a preference for English fi re- 306 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta arms incised with the brand name Tower persisted, but eventually the Jola also procured weapons from the French. Brooks (2010: 172) observes that a French company employed Franco-Africans as ‘compradors’ to navigate pirogues along the Casamance River and its tributaries specifi cally selling English Tower muskets, ‘because Africans disdained French models’. Gunpowder, musket balls and fl ints as well as sabres were also exchanged for local products such as rice, beeswax and hides. Rice often served as the unit of exchange value. Early in 1860 the colonial authorities in Dakar sent a military force of eight hundred men under Pinet-Laprade on a punitive expedition against Th ionk-Es- syl. Th e men of Th ionk had earned a reputation as pirates and had recently captured and held for ransom the wife and young child of Bertrand-Bocandé, the ‘resident’ at Carabane. When the French met the men from Th ionk in battle, some of the Diola forces were armed with guns, others with lances and shields. Th ionk-Essyl sustained losses of 40 dead and 200 cattle; the French forces suf- fered no fatalities. Th ionk was then, as it remains today, the largest community in Djougoutes (now called Buluf). Yet the weapons at its disposal, and the fact that many of the men were armed with spears and hippopotamus-skin shields, left them unable to off er meaningful resistance to a modern military force. In his post-expedition report Pinet-Laprade wrote, evidently speaking of the eighteen or twenty villages grouped along the edge of Djougouttes Plateau, ‘Th ese villages have a general population of 18,000 inhabitants and 3,000 fi rearms.’ It is not clear how Pinet-Laprade arrived at his estimate of 3,000 guns, especially in view of the fact that he did not visit all of the villages. But, given that his estimate of the population – 18,000 – is in line with late nineteenth-century estimates (in 1960 the population was over 40,000; today, urban migration and ongoing civil war have probably decreased this number), and crediting Pinet-Laprade with similar accuracy for the weapons census, it appears a considerable quantity of fi rearms were already dispersed through Buluf. Nevertheless, the ‘Floups’ had nowhere near suffi cient fi repower to protect themselves from the French. A generation later, the situation was radically transformed by the infl ux of thousands of weapons, quite clearly associated with growth in the production of wild rubber and palm produce throughout the Casamance. Jola men sold these forest products in Bathurst or at Carabane. By the 1880s, palm kernels and palm oil, along with wild rubber, provided a regular, if small, source of income for the people of the Casamance. By 1880, seasonal migration to the Gambia to collect palm produce was giving the people of Djougoutes regular access to English goods, including weapons (Mark 1976: 341–61). Th e proximity of the Gambian border, easily accessible by pirogue, meant that the Jola of Djougoutes had their choice of either French (at Carabane) or English goods. Hence, their geographical situation and their earlier trading links gave them increased access to interregional and international markets. One result of this labour migration and the associated infl ux of consumer goods was that within a few years, the peo- Market Networks and Warfare 307 ple of Djougoutes were able to defend themselves eff ectively against the recurrent attacks of Muslim slave raiders, most notably Fodé Sylla and Brahim NDiaye. In Djougoutes in 1886, the men of several villages came together and infl icted a crushing defeat on the Mandinka warlord and slave trader Fodé Sylla (also known as Combo Sylla). Th e Jola victory is recorded both in contemporary French reports preserved in the Senegalese archives, and in local oral traditions in Boulouf. In 1975, when Mark interviewed the elders in several of the villages that had united to defeat Sylla, the oldest of these informants had been born a decade after the battle. Th e men stopped the conversation to sing; the verse was about the battle. Th ey then recounted that ‘we captured a horse belonging to one of Sylla’s horsemen.’ (Th ey also captured his war drum, which they keep to this day.) ‘Until then we had thought that horse and rider were one frightful beast.’[interview with the elders of Th ionk-Essyl,Batine, including Cheikh Abba Badji, March 1975.] Th ese men were reciting songs they had learned at their own initiation in 1919, but the initiation songs had ‘belonged’ to their grandfathers, who were themselves the victorious soldiers. Th e same oral traditions also preserve a memory of the importance of fi rearms. When Jola living in the village of Kartiak observed Sylla’s preparations for his attack, they gave the pre-arranged alarm – the fi ring of their guns – to the neighbouring villages. Warriors from the other villages arrived in time to ensure the Jola victory. Th is oral tradition is confi rmed, at least in part, by an 1888 report written by the ‘Administrateur Supérieur’ of the Casamance:

Sylla attacked the people of Djougoutes … but they resisted coura- geously and repulsed him … of Sylla’s forces, only nine managed to escape and the Jola are said to have captured 45 horses. Th is fact is highly signiﬁ cant as what had always facilitated the trouble-makers’ success was the fear that the Jola had of horses; if they are no longer afraid, they will certainly defend themselves even more successfully.29

Th e Jolas of Djougoutes prevailed. What contributed signifi cantly to their victory, besides the alliance among several villages that traditionally were at odds with each other, was the wide distribution of fi rearms by the 1880s, which enabled the Jola to eff ectively form a local militia. Klein’s thesis is supported by the nineteenth-century history of the northern Casamance.

Conclusion Th e Casamance region of southern Senegal was an important part of the Por- tuguese commercial sphere in Greater Senegambia as early as the mid-fi fteenth century. By the mid-sixteenth century it had become an important focus of the nascent Atlantic system. As such it was linked to a global economy that reached 308 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta from Portugal to Brazil to India. Th e resulting commerce brought the Casamance a wide range of goods, including, by the last two decades of the sixteenth century, blade weapons. Access to these weapons, however, was limited to those who controlled the export trade in slaves. Hence, the distribution of the imported blade weapons was limited to, or at least controlled by, the local rulers who dominated the ‘production’ of slaves for export. It is important to point out that in the Casamance, the focus of our investigation, cavalry never played a central role in warfare. From the seventeenth century, blade weapons (but not horses) were valued trade imports – as was iron, for local blacksmiths were able to craft new swords from iron bars. In this geographical area there was no warrior elite consisting of cavalry, nor – with the possible exception of the sixteenth-century Kassanké ruler named Massatamba – did local rulers maintain the means to raise and support fi ghting forces of horsemen. Rather, weapons were distributed broadly through the population, at least among those who had access to trade goods – beeswax early on, rice and hides, but also captives. Th ree centuries later, the situation diff ered substantially. Again, international trading networks brought access to weapons, but by the 1880s at the latest, palm produce and rubber had replaced the earlier primary exports of wax and probably rice. Th ese forest products could be collected and sold by households or even by individuals. Th e main transformation to follow the growth of this trade was the widening of access to imported trade goods, including fi rearms. A village armed with guns could stave off slave raiders and maintain local communities’ independence. What was similar between the two contexts, and what changed? In both cases the arms came from abroad, not from an African market, although for seventeenth-century Casamance we are not sure how many blade weapons arrived through the Atlantic trade and how many were made locally. Nevertheless, unlike the trade in blade weapons, the import of fi rearms represented access to weapons that local technology was not readily able to appropriate and reproduce. Paradoxically, a mid-nineteenth-century protocolonial European implantation by the French gave Felupe/Jola access to a means of defence against both European and African (Mande) off ensives. Between 1600 and 1800 the Casa- mance had gone from being a central focus of the Portuguese coastal commercial network to being only on its periphery. Th is loss of importance was due in part to the Luso-African network’s increasing inability to compete with Franco-Africans and Anglo-Africans. Unable as well to supply weapons to all of the Casamance from its local ‘escale’ at Ziguinchor, the Luso-African network lost its paramount role among the local Felupe/Jola. In contrast to the earlier period of centralized trade, this latter commerce was more widely distributed among the population. Whereas the earlier swords were concentrated in the possession of wealthy and powerful individuals – for exam- Market Networks and Warfare 309 ple, the King of Bussis in what is now Guinea-Bissau – the nineteenth-century trade placed guns in the hands of individuals. At fi rst sight this change looks like either a factor or a result of the remarkably egalitarian society that characterized the Jola of Djougoutes/Boulouf at the beginning of the colonial period. However, rather than mechanically linking social organizational factors to warfare technology,30 this chapter has raised evidence to support the major role played by the market-based transformation in access to weapons that ultimately resulted from African purchasers’ choices. In either case, and despite the diff erences between the seventeenth- and the nineteenth-century long-distance commerce aff ecting the Casamance, the weapons trade played an important role in connecting regional trade networks with wider, interregional and transnational commerce. Th is chapter has off ered a diachronic comparative approach to the weapons trade in a single region, the Casamance, or northern Guiné do Cabo Verde. Th is methodological choice enabled us to show the relevance of diff erential access to various kinds of weapons in diff erent historical contexts. Th is comparative approach includes in the equation an important blade weapons trade that we have recently discovered. We compare this early period to the subsequent African consumption of guns in the Casamance, following the comprehensive perspective taken in recent historiography of African warfare (Th ornton 1999). Th e shift from swords to guns seems to correspond to more than a technological change. It refl ects, not the decline of Portuguese infl uence and the rise of French and British infl uence in the region, but rather, a shift in African market conditions. Th is exercise in comparative history, based both on written sources and oral traditions, demonstrates that the major transformation in arms commerce in the Casamance region from the early seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century took the form of replacing limited acquisition of blade weapons (‘armas brancas’) with more widespread access to fi rearms in local communities. Th is enabled the communities to resist the attacks of nineteenth-century slave warriors and to maintain their autonomy. Paradoxically, this change was related to a new, protocolonial power, specifi cally the growing European presence in the region, in a new transnational historical context.

Peter Mark is a professor of African art history at Wesleyan University. He has held appointments in the History Department at the University of Lisbon and at the EHESS in Paris. He was a senior fellow at Re:work (Humboldt University, Berlin) in 2012/13 and an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Frobenius In- stitut in Frankfurt am Main. Mark is the author of ﬁ ve books, including Th e Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Portuguese Style and Luso-African Identity (Indiana University Press, 2002), and (together with José da Silva Horta) Th e Forgotten Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 310 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta

José da Silva Horta is an associate professor at the Department of History, Fac- ulty of Letters, School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. A researcher and member of the board of directors of the UL Centro de História, he is also director of the FLUL African Studies B.A. programme. Among his publications are (with Peter Mark) Th e Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2013); A ‘Guiné do Cabo Verde’: Produção Textual e Representações (1578–1684) (Funda- ção Gulbenkian and Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, 2011); and A Repre- sentação do Africano na Literatura de Viagens, do Senegal à Serra Leoa (1453–1508) (Mare Liberum, 1991).

Notes 1. In this chapter we use the concept of Senegambia as meaning Greater Senegambia (which can be identiﬁ ed with the Portuguese concept of ‘Guiné do Cabo Verde’). See Boubacar Barry (1988), as reformulated and developed by Horta and Mark (2007 [2010]) and Eduardo Costa Dias and Horta (2007 [2010]) 2. Th is ‘cycle’ model has been critically reassessed by John K. Th ornton (1999: 5–6). For a full discussion of African warfare factors in perspective and in several Atlantic regions, also see Th ornton (1999). 3. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (Hereafter ANTT), Inquisição de Lisboa, Livro 194, folios 159–160v; Livro 208 fol. 640–644v. We are deeply grateful to Florbela Frade for having called our attention to the second reference and to Miguel Sanches de Baena for sharing with us his expertise on weapons and weapons production history. For a more detailed account of this trade see Mark and Horta (2011: chap. 4). 4. In the same period an indeterminate number of swords assembled in Lisbon were also going to Angola (see Marques 2009), but the Inquisidores’ attention was focused on the weapons sent to the Upper Guinea Coast. 5. Philip Curtin (1975) lists swords and cutlasses among the Senegambian imports from the 1680s to 1730s. Walter Rodney (1970) also makes reference to the importance of blade weapons among other merchandize traded by Luso-Africans. Although the earliest reference he gives is the 1669 account of Lemos Coelho, this trade developed much earlier. 6. Not all of the sword makers or barbeiros de espadas named by one of them, Gaspar Car- doso, were involved in the trade for the entire eight or nine years. In addition, one of the men is reported to have produced only 18 swords, and two others 20 or 30 per year; another man made 40 per year. Th is renders any estimation of the total number of weapons exported quite approximate. 7. Th e complete list of names engaged in sword production for the Guinea market in 1590 is: Espinosa, Domingos Jorge, Francisco Álvares, Alexo Brás, Nuno Camelo, António Fernandes, Simão Carvalho and Manuel Teixeira. See ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, livro 194, ﬂ s. 59–60. 8. ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Livro 203, fol. 643v: ‘perguntado que terçados cujos quan- tos são disse que são espadas larguas de quatro palmos pouco mais ou menos humas voltas (curved) e outras direitas que coustumão vir de Frandes e de Veneza, e aqui se guoarnes- sem com cabos d’estanho.’ Market Networks and Warfare 311

9. Archivo General de la Nación, Lima; Leg. 34; 1578–1624; Nueva signatura; SO-CO Ca 2; Do 8; Año 1573 F 1014v: ‘cargazones llevadas a Cacheu, en el Nuestra Señora del Vencimiento y San Juan Bautista, a cargo de Manoel Batista Peres; fecha August 15–26 November 1616. We wish to thank Linda Newson and Susie Minchin for making this document available to us. 10. See Blanco (n.d. [1990]) for a translated edition of the ‘Instrucion que A. V. Magestad se da, para mandar fortifi car el mar Oceano, y defender se de todos los contrarios Piratas, ansi Franceses, como Ingleses, en todas las nauegaciones de su Real Corona dentro de los Tropiccos’. 11. ‘Porque prohibindolhes o Contratador leuarem deste Reino fazendas defezas, e naõ dando licença a alguns nauios para irem a Guiné, as passaõ a França e dahi as leuaõ á dita Costa, comerceando mais nella por aquella via que pella deste Reino, e de Cacheu as vaõ buscar para as recolherem em suas cazas’, D. Francisco de Moura, ‘Lembranças e advertencias’ (Brásio 1968: 698–700). 12. Almada’s account of c 1596 makes clear that there was an association between the horse trade and the cavalry expertise taught to the Wolof courts by these merchants. André Ál- vares de Almada, untitled abridged version of his Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné do Cabo Verde: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (BNP, Lisbon), codex 525, fol. 7v. 13. ‘Usam nas guerras azagaias, frechas, adargas, facas, espadas curtas como os Jalofos e os mesmos vestidos’ (Almada 1594 [1964]: 69). 14. ‘… usam cavalos, mas poucos, porque alguns que têm se levam da Ilha do Cabo Verde, ou da terra dos Jalofos ou Mandingas’ (Th ey use horses but a few, because some are taken from the island of Cabo Verde [Santiago] and others from the lands of Wolof and Man- dinka) (Almada 1594 [1964]: 63). 15. ‘Cavalgam os Reis desta terra algumas vezes em cavalos, e as mais das vezes em bois, sendo a jornada perto’ (ibid.: 68). 16. Ibid.: 95. At that time, the horses came from inland networks, such as from the Geba basin. 17. ‘Os mais dos negros, de Casamança até este Rio, … usam pouco cavalgarem cavalos; alguns Reis e fi dalgos o fazem, mas poucas vezes: a mais das vezes é em vacas e bois, que para isso têm mansos, com as ventas furadas, nas quais trazem uns cordeis ao modo de freio, com que os governam. E andam muitas jornadas e têm muito bom passeio; o mesmo usam Casangas, Banhuns, Buramos, Bijagós’ (ibid.: 98). 18. ‘… se leuantarão quanti(da)de de gentios com armas contra hum dos dittos mercadores soubre duuidas de seos negosios: aos gritos, e brados, acodimos os Religiozos a ver se podiamos aquietar e apaziguar a briga, hera tão grande a furia dos gentios, e tantos os tra- cados (sic for traçados, i.e. treçados or terçados, short swords), fl exas (frechas) e azagaias, q¯ cahirão soubre os portuguezes e soubre nos, q¯ todos estiuemos arriscados a mortte.’ Friar André de Faro, in A. Brásio (1992: 192–93): ‘a large number of men rose up with arms against one of these merchants, because they doubted his trade [i.e. his honesty] screaming and shouting and we, the friars intervened, to see if we could calm and pacify the situation, (but) so great was their anger and they had so many terçados and frechas and spears, that they raised against the Portuguese and against us, that we felt we all risked being killed’. 19. Felupe (fem. Felupa; Eng: Floop), a term used as early as the sixteenth century, is the label corresponding most closely to the ancestors of the Jola (Diola; Joola) peoples. 20. A change in the dominant political power in the Serra Leoa region in the mid-sixteenth century was characterized by Mane migrations followed by military actions. Nevertheless, the image of Mane invasions destroying the indigenous coastal Sapes societies was a Por- 312 Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta

tuguese and Luso-African interpretation of local oral traditions. As Horta (2011: 308–10) has shown by confronting Almada’s Oporto ms. (and Lisbon ms.) with the abridged version in the BNP codex 525, Mane polities attacked coastal Sapes to get tribute when the tribute was not paid. Although there was a fi rst moment of political change by military force, no destruction of the local societies whom Portuguese writers called ‘Sapes’ took place. Th is is confi rmed by Almada’s representation of a fusion of cultures as well as an example of continuity of previous Temné royal lineages, described by André Donelha (Horta 2007: 410–11). Furthermore, Sapes’ material culture was not destroyed, as Mark has shown in his revision of the dating of Sapes or Luso-African ivories (Mark and Horta 2011: chap. 5). For a diff erent perspective on the eff ects of Mane invasion, see Green (2012). Green is correct to point to a rise in Sapes captives in the Atlantic trade as evidence of fi ghting. Such fi ghting does not, however, imply the destruction of Sapes society. Indeed, Manuel Álvares, writing in 1615, clearly indicated that Sapes society survived – at least in part – the incursions of the Manes (Mark 2007: 189–211). 21. According to Hair: ‘At the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was stated that the Sape used daggers called adibes and swords called adibe sabane, that is “large dagger” (Fer- nandes, f. 125). Cf. Temne athis abana “knife big” (indef.), or Landuma atis “knife”. Many of the items of vernacular vocabulary quoted by the Portuguese and stated to be associated with the Mane turn out to be “Sape”. Possibly this indicates that the informants were “Sape” — i.e. Temne-speaking. But it also suggests that there may have been much less cultural discontinuity as a result of the Mane invasions than is argued by Rod- ney’ (Hair 1970: 60-68). 22. On Mane tactics and military formation see Th ornton (1999: 46). 23. ‘… todos estes Reinos dos Banhús que tenho nomeado que são quatro fora de Caçamança dizem forão subgeitos ao de Caçamança, hoje vivem todos em sua liberdade, não observão religião nenhuma, se bem que não faltão mandingas que os enganão com seus embustes, e mais barbaramente vivem os Falupos que não tem communicação com esta gente, e aqui já se pode fazer muito fruto na religião catholica, e quanto mais para o sul mais, os generos que são necessarios para estes rios he ferro, colla, roupa, christal, alambre agua ardente, polvora, escopetas, e avelorio preto, branco, e côr de telha’ (Peres 1990: 1–88, 32). See also Francisco de Lemos Coelho, Descripção da Costa da Guiné desde o cabo Verde athe Serra Lioa com Todas Ilhas e Rios que os Brancos Navegão Feita por (…) no Anno de 1669: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal /Lisbon (BNL), Res. Cód. 319. 24. See Lemos Coelho (1684), ‘Discripção da Costa de Guiné e situação de todos os portos, e rios della; e roteyro para se poderem navegar todos seus rios’, BNL, Cód. 454, in Peres (1990: 89–250, 143). 25. Archives Nationales du Sénégal (hereafter ANS) 13G 361 1. 26. ANS 1G 23, ‘Rapport de M. Bertrand-Bocandé April 10, 1850’. 27. ANS 13G 361 1. 28. Ibid. 29. ANS 13H 462 2, 17 July 1888, ‘Administrateur Supérieur de la Casamance au Gouver- neur du Senégal. (Th e correct date is undoubtedly 1886.) ‘Sylla … a attaqué les Djou- goutes … mais les Djougoutes ont bravement resisté, l’ont repoussé, (des) hommes de Sylla, neuf seulement auraient pu échapper, et (les Jolas) auraient pris 45 chevaux. Ce fait d’avoir pris des chevaux a un grand importance, car, ce qui avait toujours fait le success des perturbateurs, était la crainte que les Yolas avaient des chevaux; s’ils n’en ont plus peur, ils se defendront certainement avec avantage’. 30. For a development of this discussion see Th ornton (1999). Market Networks and Warfare 313

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A Bahn (Nimba), 272 Abramowitz, Sharon A., 199, 207 Baila, 48, 52, 54 actor-network theory, 6, 248, 249. See Bainuk, 303 also Latour, Bruno Balanta, 46, 107–8, 111n25, 159–60 Adelman, Howard, 201 Bance Island, 27, 31 Africa Rice Centre (AfricaRice), 182 Barraca (township), 123, 129, 130 African markets, 300, 302 Bayart, Jean-Francois, 205 African middle class, 7 Beah, Ishmael, 246 agency (creative and youth), 207 Benin, 41, 58, 182 Agha, Asif, 215n14 Bertrand-Bocandé, Emmanuel, 305, agriculture, 185–90, 192, 282 306 agro-dealer, 188 Beyla, 264, 265, 266, 276n9 Agudás, 41 Biafadas, 303 Aku, 3 big man, 26, 34, 203, 204, 205, Alliance for a Green Revolution in 206,214n2 Africa (AGRA), 183, 184, 189–90, bigmanity, 214n2 193n10 Melanesia, 205, 215n13 Allie, Joe A.D., 199 patronage, 198–99, 201, 204, Allsopp, Richard, 157, 167, 168 205, 207, 210, 211, 213, Almada, André Álvares de, 24, 25, 214n3 27, 160, 171n9, 175, 302–3, blade weapons, 13, 299–304, 308–9, 311nn12–14, 311n20 310n5 Americo-Liberians, 3, 7, 267, 268, Boa Vista (island), 120, 122–23, 127, 269, 272, 276n7 130, 151n4 Anderson, Benjamin, 8, 109n10, 256, Boas, Morten, 199, 223 268 Bohannan, Paul, 204 Anderson, Benjamin J., 32 Bong (County), 264, 268 anomie, 207 borders, 79, 95, 116, 128, 225, 250n5 antipolitical development, 175, 191–92 borders and boundaries, 78, Arab-Berber merchants, 302 national borders, 21, 111n31, Archibald, Steven, 199, 209, 211 258, 265, 274 Arguim, 302 state borders, 4, 11, 258 authority, 24– 27, 35, 199, 203–12, Bosnia, 207, 214n5 214n2 Boston, 22, 30, 137, 141, 148, 151n4 autochthony, 105–6 Braithewaite, John, 207 brotherhoods, 45, 66, 164 B Buluf/Boulouf (polity), 306, 307, 309. Backedu, 267 See also Djougoutes backstage, 63–64, 65, 66 ‘bush wives’, 207, 210 Baga, 32, 159, 161, 162, 165, 171n2 Bussis (king of), 309 316 Index

C Senegal, 100, 306, Cabral, Amílcar, 7–8, 50, 132n7 Sierra Leone, 12, 69–70, 198, Cacheu, 45, 46, 161, 171n6, 302, 305 201–4, 206, 207, 211, Cape Verde, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 13, 40, 44, 222–23, 235, 237 50, 116–22, 124, 126–30, 131n2, Sri Lanka, 48, 49, 52 131n4, 132n5, 132nn16–17, Clapham, Andrew, 199 135–38, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, clientelism, 202 149, 151n2, 157, 158, 161–68 climate change, 9, 177, 191, 300 Cape Verdeans, 2, 5, 6, 44, 46, 47, Coelho, Francisco L., 161, 176, 304, 50, 53, 118–22, 124, 127–30, 137, 310n5, 312nn23–24 141, 147, 150, 164 Collier, Paul, 223 captives, 58, 164, 165, 299, 305, 308, colonialism, 1, 40, 42, 47, 52, 53, 311n20 130, 137, 283 Carabane, 305–6 colonial powers, 7, 8, 50, 274 Casamance, 12–13, 40, 95–107, Combo Sylla. See Fodé Sylla 109n3, 109nn6–8, 110n18, commerce, 24, 26, 27–31, 33, 45, 111nn24–25, 111n31, 160, 176, 261, 264, 299–300, 301, 308, 309 214n1, 282, 299–309 Committee for the Protection of Cassangas, 302 Journalists (CPJ), 231 cavalry, 300–3, 308, 311n12 communicative practice, 215n17 Ceylon, 44, 51 comparative approach/comparative Chambers, Robert, 198, 200 history, 300, 309 Charleston, 22, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, confl ict 33, 34 causes of confl ict, 223, 256 Chicothi, 52 postconfl ict, 9, 10, 197–200, 203, child protection, 10, 241–49, 250n1, 204, 206–13, 214n4, 215n8, 250n6 242, 245, 246, 255, 274 child soldiers, 6, 10, 203, 241, 242, Conneau, Th eophilus, 24–26 245–48 connections, 1, 157, 169, 192n6, 268, Christensen, Maya M., 198, 215n16 281, 289, 291, 292, 293, 294 Christianity, 2, 29, 45, 49 global connections, 12, 13 Christians, 45, 59, 301 transnational connections, 12, Church Missionary Society (CMS), 35, 40, 66, 78, 138, 225, 255, 28–30, 32, 34 258 citizenship, 28, 72n10, 77, 79, 83, 86, Conneh, Sekou D., 271 89–91, 148, 150, 233, 235, 257, Consultative Group for International 268, 272 Agricultural Research (CGIAR), civil society, 85, 202, 225, 228, 233, 181, 193nn8–9 236–37 Conté, Lansana, 82, 84, 266, 276n2, civil war 293 Côte d’Ivoire, 202 Convention against Torture, 201 Guinea-Bissau, 12 Convention on the Rights of the Liberia, 69, 198, 202, 203, 206, Child, 242 210, 211, 214, 215n12, 256, conviviality, 48, 51, 54, 163, 166 257, 262, 267, 271, 273 corruption, 225, 237 Index 317

Côte d’Ivoire, 1, 12, 131n1, 182, 202, democratization, 225, 230 208, 250n2, 257, 259, 268, 273, Denov, Myriam, 202, 206, 207, 208, 280 209, 210, 211, 215n16 Coulter, Chris, 10, 12, 202, 206, 207, development, 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 34, 82, 210, 247 117, 119, 120, 122, 129, 174–75, creole 177, 179–86, 188–92, 192n7, 211, creole identity, 27, 29, 41, 42, 225, 228, 231, 235, 236–37, 242, 44, 45, 53, 107 250n4, 265, 274, 280, 288, 290, creole language, 2, 3, 40, 41, 42, 294, 300 43, 47–48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 61, diamonds, 285–87, 289, 290 107, 157, 160, 161, 162, 167, ‘blood diamonds’, 12, 223, 242 168, 171n8, 222 diaspora, 4–6, 29, 52, 68–70, 78–79, creole stratiﬁ cation, 135–50 96–104, 106–8, 109n5, 109n9, creoleness, 6, 42, 138, 163, 165, 168 109n11, 110n12, 110n21, 111n34, creolization, 3, 6, 32, 34, 40–41, 42, 112n35, 112n44, 118, 120, 45, 46, 53, 59, 157, 166, 168, 169 136–42, 144–48, 150, 151n4, Luso-creolization, 41–44 151n7, 255, 257, 258, 273, 281, criminal libel, 228–29 285, 286, 288 crioulo, 41 Diola, 9, 97, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, crisis, 9, 77, 81, 120, 123, 130, 106, 107, 109n3, 110nn19–21, 131n1, 144, 198, 245 111nn24–25, 112n35, 112n37, of the patrimonial state, 202, 206 112nn40–41, 159, 160, 171n9, of women, 206 174, 175–78, 180, 183, 187, 191, of youth, 206, 223 300, 305, 311n19. See also Jola crop, 138, 175–79, 188, 192nn4–5, Disarmament, Demobilization, and 193n8, 305 Rehabilitation, 241 cash crop, 180–81 discourse(s), 4, 5, 6, 9–10, 63, 78, cultivation, 9, 176, 177, 179, 180, 82, 89, 97, 98, 105, 116, 117, 119, 183, 187, 189, 191, 282, 283 122, 123, 127, 130, 181, 182, 187, cultural relativism, 226 197, 198, 199, 206, 223, 224, 244, culturalism, 258–59 271 Curtis, Benjamin, 25, 30 discourse of human rights, 199, Curtis, Th omas Gaﬀ ery, 34 213 customary discourse of injustice, 209, 210 law, 10, 211, 230 discourse of rights, 200, 201, limitation, 204, 205 215n8, 242, 243 moral code, 204 Djougoutes, 305, 306–7, 309, 312n29. See also Buluf D Doe, Samuel, 198, 256, 266, 271, daggers, 299, 300, 301, 302, 312n21 280 Das, Veena, 67, 212 domestic workers, 138 Davis, Natalie Z., 204 Donelha, André, 161, 311n20 Dawda Jawara, 282 Durham, Deborah, 215nn15–16 democracy, 119, 129, 228, 230, 236, Durkheim, Emile, 213 266 Dutch Burghers, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53 318 Index

E F Economic Community of West failed states, 225 African States Monitoring Group Fambul Tok International, 233 (ECOMOG), 69, 255 family, 12, 21, 24, 26–35, 36n7, 45, economic social and cultural rights, 51, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 80, 81, 83, 236 85, 86, 89, 99, 100, 104, 107, ecumene, ecumenes, 157, 158, 166, 110n13, 137–38, 140–42, 147, 168, 169–70 148, 159, 160, 161, 165, 175, 210, Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 215n9 225, 233, 282–83, 288, 290–91 elders, 24, 49, 159, 176, 200, 209, famines, 137 211, 226, 268, 271, 283, 294, 307 Fanthrope, Richard, 198, 199 Elinkin, 305 Farmer, Paul, 198 elite capture, 198, 203, 205 farmers, 175–76, 181–91, 193n10, of resources, 198 264, 265 emigrants, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 90, Faro, Friar André de, 303, 304, 91, 164 311n18 Emitai, 176 Felupe, 46, 303, 308, 311n19 encounters, 28, 82–83, 136, 138, 139, Ferguson, James, 186, 190, 191, 225, 144, 147, 157, 166, 169, 176, 261, 289 274, 281 Ferme, Mariane, 190, 199, 202, 211, Euro-African encounters, 2, 45 215n15 global encounters, 1 ﬁ rearms, 13, 299–300, 304–9. See also regional encounters, 1 trade England, 2, 22, 30, 33, 151n4, 185, ﬁ rstcomers, 42, 45, 106–7, 214, 259, 299, 300, 302 261, 269, 270 Englund, Harri, 225, 236 Foca rape trial, 214n5 Enloe, Cynthia, 210 Fodé Sylla, 307 ‘Ent-fremdung des Fremden’, 7 Ford, Martin, 261, 262, 265, 268, 272 ethnicity, 50, 51, 88, 107, 109n3, 124, formal education, 81, 236 125, 126, 176, 256, 257, 274, 275 foster relations, 138 ethnoscape, 116, 119, 130, 256–57 Fourah Bay College, 232, 235 Euro-Africans, 25–26, 27, 32 Franco-Africans, 305, 306, 308 Euro-African trade networks, 282, 300 Fraser, John, 26, 33–34 European-ness, 3 Fraser, Phenda, 33 exchange(s), 1, 2, 5, 12, 45, 135, 145, free press, 228 147, 175, 176, 236, 270, 285, 286, freedom of expression, 10, 224, 299, 301, 305, 306 226–30, 232, 233–37 global exchange, 13 freedom of information, 227, 229, 232 patron and client, 204, 208 Freetown, 4, 26, 27, 29, 32, 58–71, exclusion, 12, 60, 63, 72n10, 97, 99, 222, 233, 280, 283, 284 103, 107, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, Freetown Teachers College, 235 125, 129, 150, 271 French colonial power, 301 ex-combatants, 6, 207, 209, 261 frontstage, 63, 65, 66 expertise, 10–11, 191, 192n6, 242, Fula, 2, 4, 11, 32, 109n8, 159, 188, 244–49, 311n12 295n17 Index 319

G guns, 164, 198, 300–1, 304, 305–9. Galakpaye, 257 See also weapons Gambia, 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 95, 96, 97, 100, 105–6, 109n3, 109nn7–8, H 189, 214n1, 257, 280–93, 304–5, Habermas, Jürgen, 197, 199, 204, 306 212, 215n17 Ganta, 256, 259, 261, 262, 263–64, Hagan, John, 214n5 267, 269, 275 Hair, Paul E.H., 28, 32, 161, 171n2, Gates Foundation, 183 171n9, 303, 312n21 Gbarnga, 264 Hancock, Ian F., 41, 162 Gbowee, Leymah, 211 Harrison, Jellorum, 28, 32 Geba, 41, 46, 47, 303, 311n16 Havana, 22, 26, 28, 29, 32 gerontocracy, 198, 209 Hawthorne, Walter, 5, 159–60, 174, Ghana, 12, 41, 126, 131n1, 174, 201, 178, 179 213 high-modernist approach, 192 Giddens, Anthony, 213 high-modernist science, 191 Gio, 261, 262, 267, 269–71 high-yield seeds, 182, 184, 188 globalization, 2, 8, 9, 13, 78, 129–30, Hoff man, Danny, 197–98, 199, 202, 149 206, 207, 223 glocalization, 9 Holman, John, 28, 30–33, 35, Glick Schiller, Nina, 81, 258, 275, 36nn7–8 281, 292 ‘home’, 5, 46, 47, 78, 82, 101, 103, Gluckman, Max, 204 106, 136, 139, 140, 144–45, governance, 7, 81, 198, 202, 206, 148–49, 150 209, 235, 237, 265 Honwana, Alcinda, 61, 215n16 bad governance, 222–23, 225 horse, horses, 302–3, 307, 311n12, good governance, 224, 231, 311n14, 311n16 233–34 horse-slave cycle, 300 Greater Senegambia, 307, 310n1 human rights, 158, 199–201, 211, Gueckedou, 265 212, 222, 225, 226, 228, 233, 234, Guiné do Cabo Verde (Guinea of 235, 236, 242–44, 249 Cape Verde), 299–300, 309 hunting, 304 Guinea, 3, 5, 7, 11, 12, 13, 23, 62, 77, 78–91, 92n10, 159, 160, 161, I 165, 167, 168, 255, 256, 257, identifi cation(s), 7, 12, 40, 47, 98, 259–74, 276n2, 276n9, 286, 293, 103–4, 106–8, 110nn20–21, 301, 302, 310n7 112nn36–38, 112nn41–42, Guinea-Bissau, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 112n45, 257 12, 13, 40–53, 54nn1–2, 84, 106, national identifi cation(s), 4, 11, 107, 109n3, 111n25, 126, 157, 88, 96, 99, 101, 112n44 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 174, 175, transethnic identifi cations, 4, 12 176–77, 180, 181, 188, 257, 281, identity, 3, 21, 42, 44–50, 58, 84, 283, 302, 309 109n4, 119, 121, 128–30, 135, Guinea-Conakry, 105, 109n8, 280, 136, 139, 159, 258, 275 281, 284, 290, 293, 295n21, 303 collective, 26, 78, 169, 187, 232 320 Index

creole, 27, 29, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, International Press Institute, 228 54, 107, 207 iron, 302, 304, 305, 308 ethnic, 11, 29, 42, 47, 107–8, Islam, 2, 267–68, 273, 276n10 144, 256, 258, 264, 268, Muslims, 47, 267, 269 272–73, 274, 275 Islamic warfare, 300 local, 104 Islamization, 267, 270, 273 national, 11, 107, 109n10, 117, 128 J transethnic, 50, 53 Jewish merchants, 301 transnational, 27, 101, 256, 259, Jola, 300–1, 305–9, 311n19. See also 264, 267, 273–74 Diola Îles de Los, 26, 27, 31, 33 journalists, 227, 229, 231, 232, 257 illiteracy, 232, 236 justice, 10, 158, 199–200, 204, 211, immigration, 46, 97, 116–17, 230, 295n7 119–21, 123, 124, 128, 129, 130, distributive justice, 211 131n1, 131n4 ‘justice as fairness’, 205, 206 inclusion, 35, 99, 118–19, 121, social justice, 10, 130, 200–201, 124–25, 129 211, 212, 213, 214 independence movement, 8, 47, 50, 51 India, 302, 308 K indigenous knowledge, 188–89, 190 Kaffi rs, 41, 47, 49–50, 51, 52, 53 injustice, 10, 204 Kafi rinha, 52 language of injustice, 205, 213, Kaplan, Robert, 223 215n14 Kartiak, 307 social injustice, 197–200, 206, Keen, David, 202 209, 210, 211–12 Kelsall, Tim, 199, 200, 202 innovation(s), 7, 43, 178, 182, 188, kinship, 26, 27, 34, 35, 159, 205, 270 189, 191 Kiss, Elizabeth, 200, 213 integration, 1, 3–4, 6, 11–12, 29, 51, Kissidougou, 265 53, 58, 61, 64, 95–98, 101, 103, Klein, Martin, 300–1, 307 104, 106, 107, 110n22, 111n33, Kleinman, Arthur, 212 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124–27, Konneh, Augustine, 257, 265, 266, 137, 146, 148–49, 159–60, 211, 271, 272, 290 256, 270, 280 Konneh, Aysha, 273 interactions, 1–2, 5, 23, 43, 70, 101, Konyanka, 257, 264, 265–67, 276n9 174, 255, 289 Kpelle, 267, 268, 276n6, 277n14 interethnic relations, 44–50, 270–71 Krahn, 256, 266 internally displaced persons (IDPs), 5, Krio, 3, 4, 107, 171n6, 207, 208, 222 103, 106, 197, 203, 214n1, 215n12 Kriol, 45, 47, 51, 54n2 international community, 6, 14n3, 78, Kristons, 45–47, 50, 53 222, 223–24, 242, 255 Kristons de Geba, 41, 46, 47 International Criminal Court (ICC), 241 L International Monetary Fund (IMF), Labonte, Melissa T., 198 9, 224 lançados, 137, 302 Index 321 land confl icts, 259–61, 264, 265, 269, Malaise (social), 206–8 276n11 Malinké, 268 landowners, 102, 137, 259, 270 Mancanha, 46, 159, 160 land reform, 188 Manding warriors, 301 latecomers, 42, 103–4, 106–7, Mandingo, 2, 4, 11, 12, 171n5, 111n31, 259 255–77, 284, 288, 290 Latour, Bruno, 6, 9, 199, 212, 248 ‘Mandinguization’, 266 Lawrence, William, 26, 32 Mandinka, 285, 290, 295n9, 307, Le Page, Robert B., 166, 171n11 311n14 Lee, Luke T., 214n1 Manes, 160, 303–4, 311n20 legitimation crisis, 207 mangrove, 160, 174, 179, 191 Liberia, 1, 2–3, 6, 9–12, 69, 181–82, Manjaco, 46, 107, 111n25, 159, 160, 189, 199, 201–4, 206–7, 210, 163 211, 213, 222, 223, 246, 247, manjuandadis, 45, 50–51 250n2, 255, 256, 257–58, 259–74, Mano, 261, 262, 269, 270, 271 276n12, 280, 281, 283, 285, 286, Mano River Region, 255 288. See also civil war Manya, 257, 264–65, 266, 267, 268, Liberians United for Reconciliation 270, 276n11, 277n14 and Democracy (LURD), 203, 266, marginalization, 51, 53, 222, 223 271, 273, 275, 276n9, 277n16 of youth, 206–7 life histories, 293 Martin, John L., 198, 214n3 life-cycle rituals, 107, 138 Marx, Karl, 204, 211 Lightbourn, Elizabeth, 32, 34 masquerades, 59, 60–61, 64, 65, 68, Lisbon, 7, 141, 148, 301, 302, 310n4 69–70, 71n1, 71n3, 72n14 Littlewood, Roland, 166, 167, 168, Matanzas, 22, 26, 28, 29 171n12, 172n13 Mauss, Marcel, 158, 177, 183 Liverpool, 22, 26, 27–28, 29, 31, 32, McGovern, Mike, 84, 202, 269, 276n2 33 media, 8, 9, 10, 51, 81, 85, 99, 120, local knowledge, 190, 244, 245, 247, 122, 127, 130, 206, 225, 226, 228, 248, 249 229, 230–35, 237 Lofa, 259, 261, 263, 264, 266, 267, Media Foundation for West Africa 269, 270, 271, 272, 276n11 (MFWA), 228 Lola, 265 media organizations, 231 Loma, 261, 263, 265, 266, 267, 268, Menzel, Anne, 207, 213 270, 271, 276n13 Merry, Sally Engle, 6, 10, 158, 200, Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), 201, 226, 243–44, 247, 248, 249, 215n11 250n5 Luso-Africans, 27, 29, 161, 163, 305, metaphorical back stages, 65 310n5 micropractices, 201 lusotropicalism, 43 migrants, 5–6, 13, 59, 60–61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 88, 89, M 91n5, 98, 105, 106, 111n33, 116, Macenta, 256, 259, 261, 264, 265, 118–30, 131n4, 139, 141–42, 144, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 260, 283, 276n9, 276n11 288, 289, 292, 293 322 Index migration, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 78, 79, New Rice for Africa (NERICA), 81, 91n5, 99, 103, 104, 110n13, 182–83 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 126, ‘new wars’, 225, 255, 276n1 131nn3–4, 132n5, 139, 145, 146, Newell, Sasha, 208 147, 151n4, 177, 200, 259, 261, Nigeria, 12, 41, 58, 59, 60, 61, 126, 265, 275, 281, 288, 289, 295n6, 127, 189, 198, 203 304, 306, 311n20 Nimba, 259, 261–62, 263, 264, 265, return migration, 135–36, 138, 268, 269, 270, 272 139, 140, 146–47, 150, 280 Njala University, 235 Mindelo, 120, 122, 127 nongovernmental organizations Mokuwa, Esther, 210 (NGOs), 6, 8, 10, 184, 225, 233, Monrovia, 181, 198, 261, 263, 264, 242, 246, 247, 248, 256, 262 272, 285–86, 288, 290 Nyamnjoh, Francis B., 229 Monteiro, Félix, 143, 144, 151n3, 163 N’Zérékoré, 259, 261, 264, 265, 266, moral economy, 147, 199, 201, 269, 275, 276n9 204–6, 208, 215n14 Moran, Mary H., 199, 206, 210, O 215n9 O’Beirne, Brian, 26 motorbike trade unions, 208–9 Ong, Aihwa, 28, 79, 81, 249 Movement for Democracy in Liberia Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), (MODEL), 203 226, 228 Mufwene, Salikoko S., 168 Oryza glaberrima (rice species), 179, Musadu, 257, 267, 272 182, 183. See also rice Muslim slave raiders, 307 Oryza sativa (rice species), 182, 183. mutual aid association, 163, 164. See See also rice also brotherhoods P N Papel, 303 nation-building, 8, 41, 44, 50, 51–52, participation, 78–80, 89, 90, 107, 54, 92n12, 96, 98, 100, 107, 108, 140, 146, 148, 235, 237, 242, 245, 109n10, 112n44, 281 292 National Endowment for Democracy patriarchy, 197, 198, 209, 210 (NED), 226 patrimonialism, 202, 204–6, 210, National Patriotic Front of Liberia 215n9, 215n13 (NPFL), 203, 266 neopatrimonialism, 202, 206, nationhood, 7, 50, 62, 66, 67, 68 215n9 networks, 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 40, 44, patron saint festivities, 136, 138, 139, 47, 51, 80, 84, 96, 99, 110n16, 142, 151n3 116, 120, 121, 141, 146, 151n3, patronage, 197, 207–9 198, 206, 250n6, 280, 285, 287, ‘big man’, 198–99, 201, 205, 289, 291, 302. See also trade 207, 210, 211, 213, 214n3 transnational networks, 1, 13, patrimonial patronage, 201–2, 104, 138, 147, 149, 244, 247 204–6 New Green Revolution for Africa, patron-client relations, 202, 175, 183–88, 190 215n14 Index 323

patronage system, 234 R political, 208, 222, 223, 290 racism, 132n17 reciprocity of patronage, 199 rain, 138, 165, 176, 180, 191, 284 ‘social patronage’, 202, 206, 208 Rawls, John, 205 peace building, 6, 8, 79, 222, 225, 236 reciprocity, 43, 130, 141, 147, 166, People’s Progressive Party 170, 199, 204–5, 208 (ex-Protectorate People’s Party), 282 reconciliation, 10, 200, 207, 255, Person, Yves, 2, 261, 264, 272 264, 267 Peters, Krijn, 202, 203, 206, 207, refugee, refugees, 5, 9, 131n4, 209, 210 200, 201, 203, 213, 214n1, philanthropists, 2 215n12, 255, 262, 266, 273–74, Piattoni, Simona, 202 276n2 Pinet-Laprade, Émile, 306 selfsettled refugees, 214n1 Pitcher, Anne, 215n9 strategies of refugees, 198 political culture, 81, 227, 234, religion, 45, 49, 50, 107, 201, 255, 235–36 267–68, 276n10, 304 political economy, 198, 204, 206, Reno, William, 202, 289 208–9, 210, 214n4, 256 reputation, 135, 167, 168, 172n13, politics, 5, 47, 54, 72n14, 78– 91, 306 99, 117, 131n1, 131n4, 141, 182, ressortissants, 77–78, 80, 81, 83, 86, 187, 192, 198, 201, 204, 205, 206, 88–91, 92n9 211, 214, 215n13, 222, 223, 225, return visits, 136, 138–40, 148–49 235, 242, 244, 257, 266, 276n6, returnees, 135, 141, 146, 147, 150, 287–94, 295n17 197, 198, 199, 200–1, 289 Pongo, 22–23, 25–26, 28–35 Revolutionary United Front (RUF), Rio Pongo, 3, 22–23, 27, 30, 69, 203, 223 31–32, 34 Rice Coast, 174, 181 pop music, 52, 237 rice, 9, 32, 102, 137, 160, 174–92, Poro, 270, 277n14 192nn2–3, 192nn5–7, 264, 284, Portugal, 2, 4, 40, 43, 44, 46, 50, 301, 305, 306, 308. See also Oryza 302, 308 glaberrima; Oryza sativa Portuguese, 2, 5, 32, 40, 43–48, rice knowledge system, 178, 179 101–2, 137, 157, 160–63, 283, Richards, Paul, 12, 25, 63, 174, 179, 301, 302, 305, 307, 308, 309, 185, 187, 189–90, 191, 199, 202, 310n1, 311n18, 311n20, 312n21 203, 207, 209, 211, 223, 255, 257, Portuguese Burghers, 41, 47–53, 266, 276n1 postconﬂ ict society, 200, 203–4, 206, ‘right to exit’, 199, 201 207, 211, 213 rights (political and civic), 10, 83, Praia (city), 120, 127, 163, 165 88–89, 236 press freedom, 229, 231 ritual, rituals, 10, 25, 27, 86, 107, Public Order Act (1965), 227–29 110n20, 112n41, 138, 140–45, public sphere, 197, 210 149, 159, 164, 165, 170, 178, 246 Q Rougé, Jean-Louis, 160, 162–63 Quinguim, 303 rumours, 84, 262, 263–64 324 Index

S Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, Sahara 228–29 southern, 302 Singhalese, 49, 53 Western, 116 Sirleaf-Johnson, Ellen, 274 Sahlins, Marshall, 205, 215n13 Skelton, William, 34 Sal (island), 120–22, 132n9, 132n13, slavery, 58, 63, 70, 135, 144 151n4 sexual slavery, 203, 206 Sande, 270 smallholder, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, Santiago (island), 120, 121, 123, 137, 191 141, 151n3, 157, 163, 165 social integration, 58–70, 148, 149, Santo Antão (island), 122 270 São Vicente (island), 120, 121, 122, social organization of labour, 188 151n4 social recovery, 212 school, schools, 27, 28–29, 32, 33, 86, societal interaction, 1 87, 95, 180, 248, 293 Society for Democratic Initiatives, science (agricultural), 181–91 228 Scott, James, 9, 191, 200, 204 Sri Lanka, 2, 41, 44, 47–54, 247 Search for Common Ground, 230, state building, 8, 130, 258 233–34, 238n15 stranger, strangers, 22, 23, 24–27, secret societies, 4, 24, 58–70, 71nn3– 29, 34–35, 84, 103, 105, 111n31, 5, 226, 230 111n34, 121, 126, 159, 214n1, Sedhiou (fort), 305 256, 259, 262, 263, 265, 268, 270, Sékou Touré, Ahmed, 81, 84, 259, 272, 276n5, 285, 287, 288 265, 266, 290, 292, 293, 295n21 strike, strikes, 66, 77, 83, 85, 87, 89, semantic fl uctuations, semantic shifts, 90, 225, 235 157–70 suff ering, 79, 85, 87, 88, 90, 112n41, Senegal, 1, 3, 6, 12, 13, 26, 30, 92n12, 151n2, 166, 197–99, 206, 210, 95– 103, 105, 106–7, 109n3, 211, 212, 274, 275 109n7, 110n14, 110n16, 111n24, supply crises, 137 112n35, 126, 159, 168, 176, 189, Susu, 25–26, 28, 32, 34, 161–62, 266 257, 295n9, 299, 302, 305, 307 Senegambia, 106, 109n8, 137, 177, T 280, 281, 282, 299, 300, 310n1 tabanca, 141, 151n3, 161, 162, 163, ‘sensitization’, 247 171n1, 171n7 Sesay, Mohamed G., 199 tabanka, 8, 157–70, 171n1, 171n12 Shaw, Rosalind, 199, 214n7 Tabom, 41 Sierra Leone, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, Tamils, 47, 49, 52 14n3, 27, 28, 31, 35, 42, 58–64, Taylor, Charles, 12, 198, 203, 256, 66–70, 71n3, 107, 159, 161, 168, 261, 262, 266, 267, 271, 273, 280 171n9, 189, 198–213, 222–38, Temne, 159, 161, 171n6, 171n9, 241–49, 255, 257, 266, 276n12, 312n21 280, 281, 283–91, 295n17, Th ionk-Essyl, 305, 306, 307 295n21, 303 Th ompson, Edward P., 147, 204 Special Court for Sierra Leone, 6, Togo, 41 199, 203, 241 Touré, Samori, 62 Index 325 trade, 13, 45, 174, 225, 285 turbulence, 157, 158, 166, 168, 170 Atlantic trade, 299, 302, 308, 311n20 U diamond trade, 280, 286, 290 UNHCR, 262 fi rearms trade, 13, 299–309 UNICEF, 248 slave trade, 1, 2, 5, 33, 35, 58, United Liberation Movement of 63, 70, 103, 160, 161, 162, Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), 299, 300, 304, 305, 307, 308 266, 273, 276n9 Atlantic slave trade, 1, 98, United Nations (UN), 6, 9, 85, 201, 112n35, 178, 179, 191, 225, 241–42, 248–49, 250n6, 192n6 255 trade networks, 2, 12, 22, 137, United Nations Mission in Liberia 255, 258, 261, 280, 282, 286, (UNMIL), 262, 271 288, 289, 299–300, 302, 308, United Nations Mission in Sierra 309 Leone (UNAMSIL), 241 weapons trade, 13, 299–309, United Provinces, 302 310n3, 310nn5–6 unity-in-diversity, 8 trade unions, 77, 85, 202, 208 Universal Declaration of Human traders, 4, 12, 13, 21–22, 24, 25–33, Rights, 201, 224 35, 46, 80, 109n8, 137, 139, Utas, Mats, 10, 198, 202, 206, 209, 160–61, 261, 265, 282 214n2, 215n16 transformation, transformations, 1, 7, 53, 80, 98–99, 119, 128, 143, 148, V 149, 150, 166, 168, 185, 187, 192, violence, 11, 14n3, 64, 65, 66, 86, 90, 192n5, 211, 214, 224, 262, 288, 103, 158, 159–63, 202, 203, 204, 300, 308, 309 207, 212, 223, 235, 237, 257, 258, translation, 7, 10, 43, 224, 226, 238 262, 263, 266, 272–75 transnational belonging, 273 ‘structural violence’, 198 transnational community, 5, 27, Virmani, Akbar, 201, 214n1 78–83, 85, 86, 91n5, 98, 118 Voinjama, 256, 257, 259, 261, 263, transnational support, 149, 227, 228, 264, 267, 269, 271, 274, 275 231 trans-Saharan route, 116 W travelling ideas, 6, 7, 224 warlord, 203, 210, 267, 307 travelling models, 2, 6–11, 224 weapons, 13, 266, 299–309, travelling practices, 6, 7 310nn4–6 Trinidad, 158, 166, 167, 168 Weber, Max, 200, 202, 204–5, 206, tropes, 124, 175 215n13 of big belly, 205 Weissbrodt, David, 201 of eating, 205 West African Rice Development of kinship, 205 Association (WARDA), 181–82 trust, 67, 228, 285, 287 Westminster Foundation for Truth and Reconciliation Commission Democracy, 226 (Sierra Leone), 10, 227, 230 Wilkinson, Richard, 32 Tubman Administration, 265, 266 Winer, Lise, 157, 167, 171n12 326 Index

Wolof, 97, 100, 104, 105, 109n3, Y 109n8, 110n19, 159, 160, 302, Yoruba, 4, 60–70, 72n14 311n12 Youmou, 265 women, 3, 22, 24, 50, 59, 92n7, youth, 10, 28, 69, 72n15, 91n4, 110n13, 138, 142, 164, 167, 177, 200, 204, 206–10, 211, 213, 178, 183, 188, 200, 204, 206–8, 215nn15–16, 223, 226, 230, 237, 210–11, 213, 215n8, 226, 230, 242, 249, 263, 281, 291, 292, 244, 269, 293 295n6 World Association of Newspapers socioeconomic youth, 69, 72n15 (WAN), 228 youth gangs, 202, 208, 215n10 World Bank, 9, 193n8, 224, 257 Z X Ziguinchor, 95, 100, 101–2, 106, xenophobia, 117, 120, 130, 258 111n24, 300, 305, 308